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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

#41

Post by c-fe »

rishikeshs wrote: post #38
_mitterpach wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Ok so from what I understood, this visualisation displays all the ISBNs that are assigned into countries, then across publishers. Books that are not highlighted are the ones that are not present on Annas Archives? Is that so? Also what do you mean by unassigned?

Annas Archive has both books in their archive, but they also have other datasets that connect a book ISBN to the metadata (title, author, publisher, ...).

In my visualisation https://isbnviz.pages.dev you can see which books they actually have the files of (blue) and which ones they know exist because they have the metadata from some other source (like google books, ...) (red). Finally, there are also ISBNs not contained in any of the sets that Annas Archive has, and these are either assigned or not assigned. A lot of the 979 prefixed ISBNs are not assigned, that means, no country/publisher has the right to assign them to a book. Other ISBNs are assigned to a publisher, but they just haven't published a book with that ISBN yet. Or they may have published a book, but Anna's archive doesnt know about the book because its not in their (or the ones they scraped) dataset.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#42

Post by ziddoap »

soneca wrote: post #31

Where the database is from? How and how often is it updated? I have two self-published books with ISBNs. Neither of them has the details in the 1st place submission (I assume it won’t be in any other as well?). One was published on Feb 23 and the other on Dec 24. I had hoped at least the older one would be there. Does anyone know why they are not? The ISBNs: - 9786500718836 - 9786501276830

From https://annas-archive.org/blog/all-isbns.html :

>We started mapping ISBNs two years ago with our scrape of ISBNdb. Since then, we have scraped many more metadata sources, such as Worldcat, Google Books, Goodreads, Libby, and more. A full list can be found on the “Datasets” and “Torrents” pages on Anna’s Archive. We now have by far the largest fully open, easily downloadable collection of book metadata (and thus ISBNs) in the world.

So, it your books would need to be present in one of the databases that Anna's Archive scraped, at the time they scraped it.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#44

Post by WillAdams »

bawolff wrote: post #39
WillAdams wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#45

Post by WillAdams »

vessenes wrote: post #5

Public 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.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#46

Post by franciscop »

I'm curious why there's no clear "Spanish" in these ISBN visualizations; there's 2 slots for English, one for France, Germany, Japan, Soviet Union, China, etc. but no big one for Spain. Do we really have so few books in Spanish? Or is this a predominantly English distribution?

I say this as someone who grew up in Spanish libraries and book shops, surrounded and immersed in Spanish books, so it feels a bit strange to see the tiny bit we occupy in the world map here.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#48

Post by spudlyo »

tokai wrote: post #40
_mitterpach wrote: post #25

Earlier 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 places that have a minimal or no formal recognition of IP rights. Not counting stateless or breakaway regions like Transnistria and Sealand, countries like Somalia and South Sudan either do not have a government-run IP system, or in the case of South Sudan are not part of the Berne Convention. I doubt that Anna's Archive operates in one of these places, but there are still safe harbors for their mission.

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#49

Post by rsecora »

franciscop wrote: post #46

I'm curious why there's no clear "Spanish" in these ISBN visualizations; there's 2 slots for English, one for France, Germany, Japan, Soviet Union, China, etc. but no big one for Spain. Do we really have so few books in Spanish? Or is this a predominantly English distribution? I say this as someone who grew up in Spanish libraries and book shops, surrounded and immersed in Spanish books, so it feels a bit strange to…

The dataset consists of books from the Anna Archive, each identified by an ISBN. The ISBNs and titles are extracted from datasets [1], which include magazines and books primarily in Chinese, English, and French.

Example: Germany publishes five times more books than the Netherlands [2], and Spain publishes twice as many books as the Netherlands. However, in visualizations, Germany appears similar to the Netherlands, while Spain and Mexico do not aligned with the high-level labels [3].

[1] https://annas-archive.li/datasets

[2] https://internationalpublishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

[3] https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

Re: Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

#50

Post by mistrial9 »

WillAdams wrote: post #44
bawolff wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

when China decided to wholesale ignore Western copyright in the digital age, completely.. the equation changed IMHO.
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