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Comment by rayrag | Hacker News Reader

I've searched for 'Lovecraft' and then opened first 15 results - no book was in library. Then I went to the openlibrary.org and again searched for 'Lovecraft' and among first 20 results I could only borrow one book for an hour. What is the point of showing books that aren't in library, or I am missing something?

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Yes, you missed that this was a weekend project that appears to simply be a search of the books in the OpenLibrary database.

I understand that it is side project that's why I went to Openlibrary website to check results there. And the thing I don't understand is why Openlibrary shows me books that aren't available to borrow. In this case I was expecting that books in search result will be available to borrow. Now after searching for a book you have manually search for a available book. Why don't they put a checkbox 'Show only available books' that would automatically filter out unavailable books?

Thanks for clarifying. I am not associated with the OpenLibrary project, so the following answer might not be completely correct. I think the goals of OpenLibrary extend beyond just loaning/borrowing books. I believe the original goal of the project was to catalog all books. You could reach out to the OpenLibrary folks to see if they have a search filter for only books available for borrow or if they are planning on making this available.

Mek here w/ openlibrary

@rayrag, there are researchers, vendors, libraries, partners like wikipedia, authors, and hundreds of thousands of people who use Open Library to track when they're reading, to promote books and reading, and to create curated lists.

Also, organizations like Internet Archive use such catalogs to manage what books to acquire (based on interest/demand from the community).

Having a home for bookcovers, citations, quotes, ISBNs, publishers, years, subjects, related editions are all valuable even if the book (source) is not yet available.

Hope this helps!

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