Comment by mekarpeles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mekarpeles | Hacker News Reader

Howdy, Mek here -- I run https://openlibrary.org over at the non-profit Internet Archive (the folks that bring you the Wayback Machine).

Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of books which you may track like goodreads.

Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source! https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary

Open Library has a very strong volunteer tribe of book-loving librarians, developers, and designers working to make the project better for our community.

We meet once a week at 11:30am PT. Ask me for the link: mek+ol@archive.org

RIGOROUS BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: We're also cultivating a 2nd non-profit open source experiment called TheBestBookOn.com (it leverages Open Library's catalog) which allows book-lovers to ask for or make rigorous book recommendations:

https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-Project/TheBestBookOn.co...

It's a very early prototype (we discuss development during our weekly Open Library call). It's being organized by Lauren Milliken, Aasif Khan, and myself and we'd love more contributors to join the discussion: mek+bbo@archive.org

The philosophy behind thebestbook.com (which is currently just a looks-like demo -- you should help us implement it!) follows this essay on Less Wrong:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

Recommendations are better when you have enough info to draw a line rather than consider a single point.

There are many websites online which give you detailed reviews. But how does their review compare to other similar books? And has this reader also read those books?

Thebestbookon.com requires a reviewer to have read 3 books and justify choosing one of them as a winner (like a college basketball bracket).

Fellow Goodreads refugees, you can import your lists into OpenLibrary.org.

1. Export: https://www.goodreads.com/review/import

2. Import: https://openlibrary.org/account/import

It seems like there is a strong desire to _not_ make OpenLibrary an alternative to Goodreads.

See discussions here[1] and here[2].

[1]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3103

[2]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1964

I think there's a very important distinction to be made between the notion of an alternative and a replacement.

I think many of us (in the Open Library community) want to see many players in the space and as much creativity as possible. We love books and we love giving book lovers options. Inventaire, LibraryThing, Goodreads, and fivebooks are all amazing services which have pioneered different, amazing experiences. And each brings something unique to the table. Goodreads is loved by 90M people.

It's also true that it's challenging for any single application (e.g. Goodreads) to serve 90M diverse users in all the ways they may prefer.

We see opportunities for the community to be better included in helping cultivate a more inclusive and diverse book ecosystem. Will it be better than service X? I don't care as much, so long as it allows researchers, students, enthusiasts, parents, and other patrons (who may be left behind by current solutions) to achieve their goals.

In order to support this mission, our primary objective at Open Library is making sure useful book and author metadata is as accessible as possible via APIs, data dumps so the community can build the right solution for their use cases. And of course, doing the best we can to build basic, useful tools to help connect readers to their reading experience and to each other.

We're a very small team (staff of 2 eng -> 4M patrons) so without the community being excited and driving, what we're able to accomplish is very limited, beyond keeping the lights on and the book data happily flowing.

So I want to echo your sentiments olah_1. As a non-profit, our goal isn't to out-complete or replace any existing service. But it very much is to provide an "alternative".

An alternative where every netizen and book lover has the opportunity to shape the future of their library. Where there are books which represent everyone. Where everyone's use cases may be served (if people are willing to put in the work). And where the limit of what's possible is bound only by one's creativity and a shared vested interest in being a good neighbor.

And for good reason.. many of those requests involve a much higher level of maintenance (moderating content like reviews, building a social network, etc)

I like that OpenLibrary is trying to be a source of open book data. But I am a bit concerned about the quality of the data (just a feeling as I am still digging into it but there are open questions on how to handle things like multiple authors, etc)

We have a small network of librarians on a slack channel who have merged more than 10,000 duplicate works.

Librarians (which is a permission role) also have the ability to merge Authors, so data improves over time.

Furthermore, members of our community coordinate with Wikidata, VIAF, etc -- we match up identifiers and sync data (and in this way, bots are able to make meaningful changes in bulk on a rolling basis).

See: http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-bots (most of which are built using the OL client: http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client)

e.g. https://github.com/cdrini/openlibrary-wikidata-bot

Holy cow, thank you for pointing this out and, well, building it in the first place. For me at least this is immediately looking better than Goodreads, which I've always kind of used begrudgingly.

This is awesome! Is there a schema link that explains the different types (works vs edition) and how they are all related?

Many in our community are intimately familiar with and sensitive to the challenges of FRBR (e.g. serials, etc) as it pertains to maintaining a system of Works and Editions.

This is an active conversation on our slack. Send me an email and I'll be happy to invite you to join the discussion.

Honestly, a lot of our Librarian bottlenecks aren't engineering, they're documentation and organization related.

Since Aaron Swartz started Open Library ~2007, there have been scores of trailblazing Librarians (like Karen Coyle and Jessamyn West) who have nudged us in the right direction and documented their opinions.

I've done by best to organize these learnings here: https://openlibrary.org/librarians

We could really use help here if you or anyone else is interested in doing some digital archaeology and helping us better organize (so we can make good schema decisions to move forward).

Thanks for bringing this up.

Fun fact, by the way: Nearly every page on Open Library is a json API of itself if you add `.json` to the end.

e.g. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M/Fantastic_Mr._Fox & https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M.json

Also related:

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client/tree/m...

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Library-...

Thanks for your work mek!

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