These ISBN visualizations remind me of the maps of IPv4 address space.
Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
61–70 of 70 posts
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, ISBNs map to: - publisher - assigned title - (roughly) order of publication That's all that they communicate --- there is no hierarchy here to aid in discovery or to organize the content (and further complicating things, the same text may appear multiple times in a different binding --- a differentiation which is immaterial to an e-book). The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Arc…
> This would be far more interesting if it were based on an hierarchical system such as LoC, and instead afforded an interface for accessing legitimately available books Isn't this exactly what Open Library does?
Given that "Textbooks" are separated out and "Animals" and "Childrens' Books" and "Health & Wellness" are top-level categories? and that it mixes in books which are not available for download, not really.
The UI is not all that great either.
I would like to see:
- an hierarchical list with a hierarchy which actually makes sense and truly organizes knowledge
- of legitimately available downloadable books
- which has a nice UI
but it's far more important that LLMs have training data without consideration of recompense than any other consideration.
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#63Im 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 also surprised that I got 3rd place.
But in terms of comparison of yours to bwv, I don't agree that bwv's is technically superior in every way. It lacks comparison, ISBN selection and link creation. bwv's main focus looks to be that one feature to highlight the rare books without trying to get the other requirements that AA wanted.
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but dealing with that politically would be made easier by having the moral high ground.
Not really, because it depends on the basis of morality. In fact, this 'morality' problem is shown in the existence of libraries in the US. Is a book a collective good? Or property? In the US the answer is 'both' in an awkward way. But the US does know that having books behind a paywall is not in society's best interest. And in reality 99% of the books will never be read, which makes their 'value' as property suspect…
If so few books are to be read, then why is it so difficult to pay for those which are?
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing is, ISBNs map to: > - publisher - assigned title - (roughly) order of publication I assume the task isn't just to visualize isbns literally. Presumably you are allowed to cross reference with other data. > The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site, I think its pretty clear that the target audience doesn't care. I don't thi…
This is not a political stance, but one of basic questions of authorship and what compensation authors should receive and what control they should have over their work. See arguments by Alexander Pope in Pope _V._ Curll.
> This is not a political stance, but one of basic questions of authorship and what compensation authors should receive and what control they should have over their work.
Questions of compensation and ownership are one of the most political questions of all.
What exactly do you think communist revolutions were revolting over?
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#66Im 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 also surprised that I got 3rd place. But in terms of comparison of yours to bwv, I don't agree that bwv's is technically superior in every way. It lacks comparison, ISBN selection and link creation. bwv's main focus looks to be that one feature to highlight the rare books without trying to get the other requirements that AA wanted.
Congrats to you too! Indeed, I think they could have improved the visual and comparison part, its a bit dark and not too interesting to look at. But I am envious of how smooth their tiling is. My tiles are 4096x4096 which allows me to satisfy both the 20,000 file limit and the max 20mb file limit imposed by cloudflare. I had some issues with smaller tiles, and wanting to host it on cloudflare restricted me from doing 512x512 tiles iirc. Also I really like that they extracted the publisher information and put that as a pmtile vector, thats something I attempted but ultimately ran out of time with.
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lin…
I like Annas Archive but its definitely not legally gray.
There are multiple ways to look at this, but for example, my middle European country's laws explicitly state that breaking copyright is okay, if the material is used for teaching purposes. Downloading for personal use is also allowed.
Are they breaking the laws of the country where they host their own data? I can't really say.
In honesty, I don't believe copyright laws will survive this decade, much less this century. With models being trained on copyrighted material and no cases setting the precendent that this is not okay, I feel like the new reality is that you can steal anything, as long as you 'launder' it through an AI model.
Maybe that may be the next big startup, re-creating copyrighted books through AI models, just different enough to skirt the laws. Who wouldn't like to read 'Owner of Numerous Pieces of Jewelery' instead of 'Lord of the Rings'?
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#68Public request: anybody here who hates Anna’s and wants to make a principled complaint about it? I love it and the idea of it so much, but I imagine some feel differently and I’d like to hear your best takedown shot.
Well, I made a comment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43193432 Does that count? The thing is, if we're going to have GPL software, then we need copyright. Yes, the terms/lengths need to be adjusted, but one can't do that by fiat/unilaterally.
To me it's not a substantive critique. I agree that copyright is useful. But I don't think it is so useful that much of the world's knowledge creation stands to be lost, which is the alternative.
And, the copyright exists because it's a societal benefit -- it is considered to encourage the creation of knowledge, art and so on -- it puts significant limitations on the rest of society. So, when we're evaluating, we need to evaluate both whether we're getting the benefit of copyright that we "pay for" and whether increasing or decreasing what society pays would be a net good.
I'd propose that in the case of books, approximately zero books don't get written because of Anna's. In fact, some pretty thoughtful authors like Cory Doctorow feel that piracy increases their net writing and impact.
So, increasing enforcement seems like it would have no net benefit on adding to our world's social capital. On the other hand, it is clear that when data (on paper or digitally) is held by only a small number of hands, it is often lost, full stop. Television archives from the first fifty years of broadcast TV, whether US or England, much less I imagine, say Poland or East Germany, are largely gone. And in places like England that had criminal penalties for illegal TV watching, I'd guess that more is gone. You can search for a recent story about this regarding Dr. Who -- the BBC had dumped a bunch of Dr. Who tape they didn't want in the (60s?). An unnamed employee saved it. Which was (and is) illegal in England. The BBC has asked for it back, but can't/won't promise there are no legal repercussions for the person who saved the data.
Enforcement like that is a net negative in my opinion; the question would be moot if we had a full archive on Anna's of every Dr. Who episode.
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I made a comment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43193432 Does that count? The thing is, if we're going to have GPL software, then we need copyright. Yes, the terms/lengths need to be adjusted, but one can't do that by fiat/unilaterally.
To me it's not a substantive critique. I agree that copyright is useful. But I don't think it is so useful that much of the world's knowledge creation stands to be lost, which is the alternative. And, the copyright exists because it's a societal benefit -- it is considered to encourage the creation of knowledge, art and so on -- it puts significant limitations on the rest of society. So, when we're evaluating, we nee…
Why are books likely to be lost?
Any decent library has a "last copy" policy where the last copy of a given book/edition is kept in a vault for reference at need.
>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
>--- Anne Herbert
Piracy directly interferes with the actual business of publishing books --- I missed out on buying _Traditional Archery from Six Continents_, and the price quickly climbed to 4 digits after it went out of print, so I made arrangements to get the rights and re-print it --- shortly before I picked up the books at the printer someone released a PDF scan of the book --- it took me over 5 years to sell out the print run and get my living room closet back.
Similarly, I'd like to arrange for re-printing J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Old English Exodus_: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Old_English_Exodus but have settled instead for binding a photocopy I was sent the second time I requested it on Interlibrary Loan because a certain archive site is handing it out for free as a poor quality scan.
If folks want books to be free, why not focus on either public domain texts, or authoring new works which have copyleft and similar licenses? Why deny authors their right to control how their work is distributed _and_ what compensation they receive.
I've done a fair bit at wikibooks.org and have put up:
https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d
and my articles in _TUGboat_ are freely downloadable --- that doesn't give me the right to take texbook.tex, edit it, typset it to a PDF and then pass out that PDF.
Dr. Who episodes are not books. Don't move the goal posts.
Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a political stance, but one of basic questions of authorship and what compensation authors should receive and what control they should have over their work. See arguments by Alexander Pope in Pope _V._ Curll.
> This is not a political stance, but one of basic questions of authorship and what compensation authors should receive and what control they should have over their work. Questions of compensation and ownership are one of the most political questions of all. What exactly do you think communist revolutions were revolting over?
How to employ and feed and compensate the masses.