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Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

annas-archive.org

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Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#21

Post by chungus »

ivolimmen wrote: post #8

I have no idea whats on the site as my provider blocks it because European sanctions against Russia as this is on of the RussiaToday sites.

Judging by your profile location being in the netherlands, I think you are confusing the generic Ziggo ISP blocked page[1], where it lists Russia Today and Sputnik News and then in another post ThePirateBay

In this case, the ISP blocked it because the website is anna's archive [2], which was blocked around a year ago, but they have not made a post about that.

If you put "pcm." in front of the link it will work (for now)

You should probably edit your post, so as not to misinform. But I have to admit this confusion stems from bad decisions at the ISP.

[1] https://www.ziggo.nl/website-geblokkeerd

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#Netherlands

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#22

Post by closewith »

spondyl wrote: post #9
rahimnathwani wrote: post #4

This is amazing. One thing I found odd. I searched for 'Stubborn Attachments' which worked. On the same bookshelf there are several other Stripe Press books. One of them is called Zero to One Hundred, by Stephanie Friedman. When you search that book on Amazon, it has a different title, which I guess is reasonable as the book hasn't been published yet and they may not have finalized the decision: https://a.co/d/bQX5CN…

I don't think it's the tool that's the issue, I think it's the book itself? If you search the ISBN on the web, you'll get "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover of "Built to Grow" and vice versa. There's also "Experiment, Build, Scale" which is the book that the visualisation shows, also with the same ISBN attributed to the previous two. Experiment, Build, Scale seems to be the only book of Stephanie's that is in Googl…

> Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.

I think that's an uncharitable read of the GP's comment. I read it as curiosity about how the upstream data issues present in the tool, which also interests the part of my brain that likes to solve minor mysteries.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#24

Post by c-fe »

Im slightly surprised mine won 3rd place, I believe they liked my simplicity and visualisation. Hosted at https://isbnviz.pages.dev

But honestly, I find both of these better: - https://bwv-1011.github.io/isbn-viewer/ - https://anna.candyland.page/map-sample.html

in particular the one from bwv is technically similar but just all around better than mine, it is what I would want mine to be

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#25

Post by _mitterpach »

rishikeshs wrote: post #23

Noob here, but can someone explain like im fivr, why this is important? It looks beautiful nevertheless

I'll start off by quoting the winning submission.

Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many books as possible.

One shadow library, Anna’s Archive (which I will not link here directly due to copyright concerns), recently posed a question: How could we effectively visualize 100,000,000 books or more at once? There’s lots of data to view: Titles, authors, which countries the books come from, which publishers, how old they are, how many libraries hold them, whether they are available digitally, etc. - https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-i...

Basically, legally gray online book repositories such as Anna's Archive, who was the creator of this bounty, are trying to collect a lot of books. The question quickly arises - how many books are there?

The best way to track books is by using ISBN, international standard book number, basically the personal id of any given books, given to books by an international agency. Now that you know which books exist, you can check which books your repository already has and which ones are missing.

But ISBN covers the space of over 2 billion possible existing books. That's a lot. So, Anna's Archive has created a contest to display this space in the cleanest way possible. The winning submission is very nicely done, and in my view very well deserving of the 6,000$ bounty.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#26

Post by highcountess »

c-fe wrote: post #24

Im slightly surprised mine won 3rd place, I believe they liked my simplicity and visualisation. Hosted at https://isbnviz.pages.dev But honestly, I find both of these better: - https://bwv-1011.github.io/isbn-viewer/ - https://anna.candyland.page/map-sample.html in particular the one from bwv is technically similar but just all around better than mine, it is what I would want mine to be

I’m glad you said that, because I was also surprised by the fact that the bwv-1011 only made it to honorable mention even though its technical focus was on visualizing the rarity of books, which ostensibly was the primary objective of the whole effort.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#27

Post by matsemann »

c-fe wrote: post #24

Im slightly surprised mine won 3rd place, I believe they liked my simplicity and visualisation. Hosted at https://isbnviz.pages.dev But honestly, I find both of these better: - https://bwv-1011.github.io/isbn-viewer/ - https://anna.candyland.page/map-sample.html in particular the one from bwv is technically similar but just all around better than mine, it is what I would want mine to be

What is it that make yours and bws' have a floating island with spain/italy/++ in addition to them being represented in the main blob?

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#28

Post by c-fe »

matsemann wrote: post #27
c-fe wrote: post #24

Im slightly surprised mine won 3rd place, I believe they liked my simplicity and visualisation. Hosted at https://isbnviz.pages.dev But honestly, I find both of these better: - https://bwv-1011.github.io/isbn-viewer/ - https://anna.candyland.page/map-sample.html in particular the one from bwv is technically similar but just all around better than mine, it is what I would want mine to be

What is it that make yours and bws' have a floating island with spain/italy/++ in addition to them being represented in the main blob?

Its due to how those ISBN ranges were handed out - I think they probably gave a block like 978-53 (for example) to those countries, meaning the right to distributed ISBNs 978-530-000-000 to 978-539-999-999 and then later they ran out or had all subblocks distributed to publishers, and then they got a new block further away (so not 978-54 in my example) and therefore those blocks are not numerically close to each other and thus also they are separate "islands" in the hilbert space.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#29

Post by matsemann »

c-fe wrote: post #28
matsemann wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it that make yours and bws' have a floating island with spain/italy/++ in addition to them being represented in the main blob?

Its due to how those ISBN ranges were handed out - I think they probably gave a block like 978-53 (for example) to those countries, meaning the right to distributed ISBNs 978-530-000-000 to 978-539-999-999 and then later they ran out or had all subblocks distributed to publishers, and then they got a new block further away (so not 978-54 in my example) and therefore those blocks are not numerically close to each othe…

I see, thanks for explaining. Cool that your visualization then shows these idiosyncrasies!

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#30

Post by c-fe »

matsemann wrote: post #29
c-fe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its due to how those ISBN ranges were handed out - I think they probably gave a block like 978-53 (for example) to those countries, meaning the right to distributed ISBNs 978-530-000-000 to 978-539-999-999 and then later they ran out or had all subblocks distributed to publishers, and then they got a new block further away (so not 978-54 in my example) and therefore those blocks are not numerically close to each othe…

I see, thanks for explaining. Cool that your visualization then shows these idiosyncrasies!

Thanks! That is indeed all thanks to using the hilbert curve fractal which has the property that it maps numbers which are close together onto 2d (or higher dimensional) coordinates which are close together, its a very cool property! Its used in lots of contexts for that reason
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