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Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

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Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#21

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.

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#22
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.

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#24

What do you think about BookBrainz? https://bookbrainz.org/

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...

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#25
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

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#27
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.)

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#29
post #9

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.

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

Re: Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more

#30
post #2

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

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