Winners of the $10k ISBN visualization bounty

My most sincere love to all shadow libraries out there, you're doing god's work.

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/bQX5CNf

Here's where it gets weird:

- if you search for the book 'Zero to one hundred' (the title shown on the 'shelf') it doesn't come up

- if you search for the book by its ISBN, it does come up, but the name displayed in the search results is yet another alternate title. And the bookshelf displays that title. So the same part of the bookshelf looks different depending on what you searched for.

I haven't yet read the blog post about how this impressive visualization works, so I don't have an idea of why this is the case.

They do half of the work (which is a helluva lot)... the other half is done by the volunteers that digitize books.

I was looking at my country's "shelve" and it's so sad to see so many missing titles. I almost wanted to go to my local livrary and digitize sone of them. The old ones that are out of print and imposible to acquire right now...

So much knowledge lost.

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.

I feel like visualizations of large datasets which are viewer-directed (i.e. they want you to "explore" the data instead of trying to tell you something specific about it or communicate a narrative) are often "pretty" but never particularly enlightening. I feel like that holds true for these in particular.