I find WikiData to be perfect for aggregating identifiers. I mostly work with species names and it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query
I haven't tried it for books. I imagine it's not sufficiently complete to serve as a backbone but a quick look at an example book gives me the ids for OpenLibrary, Librarything, Goodreads, Bing, and even niche stuff like the National Library of Poland MMS ID.
Cracks me up that OP is trying Anna's Archive before Wikidata, NGL! Both great sources, though.
I recently (a year ago... wow) dipped my toe into the world of library science through Wikidata, and was shocked at just how complex it is. OP's work looks really solid, but I hope they're aware of how mature the field is!
For illustration, here are just the book-relevant ID sources I focused on from Wikidata:
ARCHIVERS:
Library of Congress Control Number `P1144` (173M)
Open Library `P648` (39M)
Online Computer Library Center `P10832` (10M)
German National Library `P227` (44M)
Smithsonian Institute `P7851` (155M)
Smitsonian Digital Ark `P9473` (3M)
U.S. Office of Sci. & Tech. Info. `P3894`
PUBLISHERS:
Google Books `P675` (1M)
Project Gutenberg `P2034` (70K)
Amazon `P5749`
CATALOGUERS:
International Standard Book Number `P212`
Wikidata `P8379` (115B)
EU Knowledge Graph `P11012`
Factgrid Database `P10787` (0.4M)
Google Knowledge Graph `P2671` (500B)
Nice approach! Merging metadata from multiple sources is tricky, especially handling conflicts like titles and covers. Curious how you plan to handle scalability as your database grows—caching helps, but will the naive field strategies hold with thousands of books?
I’ve recently acquired some photo books that don’t appear to have any ISBN but are listed on WorldCat and have OCLC Numbers and are catalogued in the Japanese National Diet Library. Not sure if they actually don't have ISBNs or if I just haven't been able to find them, but from what I got from some research it's quite common for self-published books.
Are you able to pull upcoming titles? All I want is a weekly/monthly list of books by authors I've ready which are coming out, and I've not been able to find it or to build it.
If the data is present in one of the extractors, yes, but I think only Amazon and similar stores keep this kind of data right now. We don't have a extractor for Amazon yet.
After v1.0.0 is out I plan to add the ability to add books manually to the database, at which point we'll be able to start improving the database without relying on third-party services.
A couple years I looked for a similar service and failed to find it. I did however find this incredible podcast network called New Books In where they interview authors about their new books. It's a massive network that's broken down by categories that can get pretty niche. Everything from "Digital Humanities" to "Diplomatic History" to "Critical Theory". Episodes appear in multiple categories so broad categories like "Science" also exist
I applaud the effort, but last time I tried this the major issue was the sheer amount of book data only available from amazon.com and scraping that is tedious to put it mildly.
You should also consider OpenLibrary and LibraryThing. Both of which have good coverage on WikiData which also aggregates identifiers.
In fact, now that I think about it, you could also contribute your work to WikiData. I don't see ISBNdb ids on WikiData so you could write a script to make those contributions. Then anyone else using WikiData for this sort of thing can benefit from your work
Does it handle languages other than English? I remember trying out some APIs like that for some tasks, and while I managed to find titles in English somewhat successfully, any other languages (be it the original title, or a translation of some fairly well-known book) were basically inaccessible.
You're most likely to run into issues with non-latin languages. Particularly picograms and the associated schemes for how to interpret them in a context sensitive manner. Substring search for example is likely to be broken in my experience.
Tried throwing a batch of known-to-be-in-Amazon ISBN's through (from a recent "export my data", so even if they're old amazon fundamentally knows them.) Got 500's for a handful of the first hundred, then a bunch of 502/503s (so, single threaded, but part of the HN hug to death, sorry!)
(Only the first 4 or so were json errors, the rest were html-from-nginx, if that matters.)
No hug of death, the server is sitting at 3% CPU usage under current load; it seems someone found a bug that triggered a panic, and systemd failed to restart the service because the PID file wasn't removed. Fixed now, should be back online :)
First time I'm seeing it, to be honest, but it looks interesting. I do plan on having an UI for Librario (built a few mockups yesterday[1][2][3]), and I think the idea is similar, but BookBrainz looks bigger in scope.
I could add them as an extractor, I suppose :thinking:
This is great - the service and that you're extending it and considering a UI.
Personally I would go with option 2 as the colour from the covers beats the anaemic feel of 1 and it seems more original than the search with grid below of 3.
Doesn't seem to have a very compleat dataset --- the first book I thought to lok for, Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_) is absent, and I didn't see the later collection _Music of Many Sphere_ either:
Please ensure that your database keeps track of whence data was obtained, and when. It's exceptionally frustrating when automated data ingesting systems overwrite manually-corrected data with automatically-generated wrong data: keeping track of provenance is a vital step towards keeping track of authoritativeness.
Since you support merging fields you likely would want to track provenance (including timestamp) on a per-field basis. Perhaps via an ID for the originating request.
Although I would suggest that rather than merge (and discard) on initial lookup it might be better to remember each individual request. That way when you inevitably decide to fix or improve things later you could also regenerate all the existing records. If the excess data becomes an issue you can always throw it out later.
I say all this because I've been frustrated by the quantity of subtle inaccuracies encountered when looking things up with these services in the past. Depending on the work sometimes the entries feel less like authoritative records and more like best effort educated guesses.
It seems someone found a bug that triggered a panic, and systemd failed to restart the service because the PID file wasn't removed. Fixed now, should be back online :)
I find WikiData to be perfect for aggregating identifiers. I mostly work with species names and it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query
I haven't tried it for books. I imagine it's not sufficiently complete to serve as a backbone but a quick look at an example book gives me the ids for OpenLibrary, Librarything, Goodreads, Bing, and even niche stuff like the National Library of Poland MMS ID.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q108922801
Cracks me up that OP is trying Anna's Archive before Wikidata, NGL! Both great sources, though.
I recently (a year ago... wow) dipped my toe into the world of library science through Wikidata, and was shocked at just how complex it is. OP's work looks really solid, but I hope they're aware of how mature the field is!
For illustration, here are just the book-relevant ID sources I focused on from Wikidata:
Not gonna lie, I didn't even know Wikidata existed until now. I'll look into it today and create a ticket for a new extractor.
Thanks for letting me know!
Would it be possible to use a SQLite file instead of a PostgreSQL instance? Or do you rely on some specific PostgreSQL functionality?
Nice approach! Merging metadata from multiple sources is tricky, especially handling conflicts like titles and covers. Curious how you plan to handle scalability as your database grows—caching helps, but will the naive field strategies hold with thousands of books?
Do you handle books with no ISBN?
I’ve recently acquired some photo books that don’t appear to have any ISBN but are listed on WorldCat and have OCLC Numbers and are catalogued in the Japanese National Diet Library. Not sure if they actually don't have ISBNs or if I just haven't been able to find them, but from what I got from some research it's quite common for self-published books.
No, right now you need an ISBN to search for a book. At a later date I'll implement search by title or author, which should help with this use case.
Are you able to pull upcoming titles? All I want is a weekly/monthly list of books by authors I've ready which are coming out, and I've not been able to find it or to build it.
If the data is present in one of the extractors, yes, but I think only Amazon and similar stores keep this kind of data right now. We don't have a extractor for Amazon yet.
After v1.0.0 is out I plan to add the ability to add books manually to the database, at which point we'll be able to start improving the database without relying on third-party services.
A couple years I looked for a similar service and failed to find it. I did however find this incredible podcast network called New Books In where they interview authors about their new books. It's a massive network that's broken down by categories that can get pretty niche. Everything from "Digital Humanities" to "Diplomatic History" to "Critical Theory". Episodes appear in multiple categories so broad categories like "Science" also exist
https://newbooksnetwork.com/subscribe
It's definitely biased towards academia which I personally see as a pro not a con
I applaud the effort, but last time I tried this the major issue was the sheer amount of book data only available from amazon.com and scraping that is tedious to put it mildly.
Hardcover and ISBNDB have a good amount of data, with Hardcover being excellent for getting good covers and genres.
I'm hoping Goodreads and Anna's Archive will help fill in the gaps, especially since Anna's Archive have gigantic database dumps available[1].
[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~pagina394/librario/12
You should also consider OpenLibrary and LibraryThing. Both of which have good coverage on WikiData which also aggregates identifiers.
In fact, now that I think about it, you could also contribute your work to WikiData. I don't see ISBNdb ids on WikiData so you could write a script to make those contributions. Then anyone else using WikiData for this sort of thing can benefit from your work
Wow. I don't have any use for this personally, but your post is really well presented, detailed and sourced. I hope it goes well!
Thanks! It's a compilation of several random comments I made for a few months, haha.
Does it handle languages other than English? I remember trying out some APIs like that for some tasks, and while I managed to find titles in English somewhat successfully, any other languages (be it the original title, or a translation of some fairly well-known book) were basically inaccessible.
I only tested English and Brazilian Portuguese so far, and Brazilian Portuguese worked, with translator information included.
You're most likely to run into issues with non-latin languages. Particularly picograms and the associated schemes for how to interpret them in a context sensitive manner. Substring search for example is likely to be broken in my experience.
Can you provide an example?
Tried throwing a batch of known-to-be-in-Amazon ISBN's through (from a recent "export my data", so even if they're old amazon fundamentally knows them.) Got 500's for a handful of the first hundred, then a bunch of 502/503s (so, single threaded, but part of the HN hug to death, sorry!)
(Only the first 4 or so were json errors, the rest were html-from-nginx, if that matters.)
No hug of death, the server is sitting at 3% CPU usage under current load; it seems someone found a bug that triggered a panic, and systemd failed to restart the service because the PID file wasn't removed. Fixed now, should be back online :)
Nice, I might try your API for my ISBN extractor / formatter at https://github.com/infojunkie/isbn-info.js
Right now, I use node-isbn https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-isbn which mostly works well but is getting old in the tooth.
Feel free to do so, just keep in mind that the demo server might be unstable and can break at any moment, haha.
I wrote a Go SDK[1] for the service, maybe I'll try writing one in TypeScript tomorrow.
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~pagina394/librario-go
Created a ticket[1] to remind myself to work on this.
[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~pagina394/librario/22
Will keep an eye, thanks!
What do you think about BookBrainz?
https://bookbrainz.org/
First time I'm seeing it, to be honest, but it looks interesting. I do plan on having an UI for Librario (built a few mockups yesterday[1][2][3]), and I think the idea is similar, but BookBrainz looks bigger in scope.
I could add them as an extractor, I suppose :thinking:
[1]: https://i.cpimg.sh/pexvlwybvbkzuuk8.png
[2]: https://i.cpimg.sh/eypej9bshk2udtqd.png
[3]: https://i.cpimg.sh/6iw3z0jtrhfytn2u.png
This is great - the service and that you're extending it and considering a UI.
Personally I would go with option 2 as the colour from the covers beats the anaemic feel of 1 and it seems more original than the search with grid below of 3.
Glad you liked the idea!
Number two is what my wife and I prefer too, and likely what's going to be chosen in the end.
Doesn't seem to have a very compleat dataset --- the first book I thought to lok for, Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_) is absent, and I didn't see the later collection _Music of Many Sphere_ either:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph...
Please ensure that your database keeps track of whence data was obtained, and when. It's exceptionally frustrating when automated data ingesting systems overwrite manually-corrected data with automatically-generated wrong data: keeping track of provenance is a vital step towards keeping track of authoritativeness.
We don't support POST, PATCH, and whatnot yet so I didn't take that into account yet, but it's in the plans.
Still need to figure out how this will work, though.
Since you support merging fields you likely would want to track provenance (including timestamp) on a per-field basis. Perhaps via an ID for the originating request.
Although I would suggest that rather than merge (and discard) on initial lookup it might be better to remember each individual request. That way when you inevitably decide to fix or improve things later you could also regenerate all the existing records. If the excess data becomes an issue you can always throw it out later.
I say all this because I've been frustrated by the quantity of subtle inaccuracies encountered when looking things up with these services in the past. Depending on the work sometimes the entries feel less like authoritative records and more like best effort educated guesses.
502 Bad Gateway :|
It seems someone found a bug that triggered a panic, and systemd failed to restart the service because the PID file wasn't removed. Fixed now, should be back online :)
Library of Congress data seems like a huge omission especially for something named after a librarian. ;) It is a very easy API to consume too.
I didn't look into it yet because I assumed the current extractors had the information from them, but it's in my list of future extractors!
hella hella cool
goodluck