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Where does it get the list of books from? I thought that was always the biggest challenge with sites like Goodreads etc. Goodreads both (A) pulls data from Amazon, and (B) has an army of volunteer "librarians" who have additional privileges to merge duplicate books etc.

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https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.

Hi, Mek here from Open Library.

I was incredibly lucky to work at the Internet Archive the same time as Mouse and couldn't be more proud of their work on BookWyrm.

Open Library and its network of generous volunteers have (I hope) made a lot of positive progress towards cataloging the books that are out there and making them more accessible to the world. AND it's absolutely the case that our project exists to support innovative projects like Bookwyrm and incredible thinkers like Mouse.

Open Library can't and shouldn't be everything. It's hard enough doing well at one thing. The Open Library team is considering how we may be able to participate within the decentralized ecosystem by offering a BookWyrm instance so readers may have more ways to socially engage with each other and connect around books. If you're interested in helping us try this as an experiment, please reach out <mek@archive.org>!

I appreciate how difficult it is to run a service which gives communities voices (it requires moderation tooling, staff, and so much more). I'm impressed by the thoughtful, impressive, and creative work Mouse has done building BookWyrm and am super grateful for its progress which I see as being a win for the entire ecosystem (an ecosystem Open Library is proud to be a piece of).

Keep it up <3

P.S. the fact that many services like Mastodon or BookWyrm may have large primary servers is not a demerit. The fact that there are smaller local servers, that new servers can emerge over time, and that engineering thought is being put into how data moves through such environments is key to acknowledging the importance of creating safe communities, promoting archival strategies, and enabling accessibility. Many people use GitHub (centrally) and also use Git (centrally) and the fact that many common use-cases have been centralized do not undermine the significance of the times where small, high impact cases are able to succeed because decentralization has made them possible.

OpenLibrary is a treasure.

I have a half-finished project that scans barcodes with the webcam, looks up the information in openlibrary, speaks the tile out-loud and records the output to a file that tellico can import.

Some people might note that tellico can take a list of ISBNs on input, so the extra step of OL lookup seems redundant. A lot of bookstores put their own barcodes (sometimes over the ISBN) and there can be namespace collisions between those barcodes and the ISBN. Looking it up on OL and reading the name out loud lets you catch these issues when scanning. There's nothing worse than scanning hundreds of books and then having to go back through to find the dozen of them that scanned wrong; by reading out-loud the OL information, you can just set them aside immediately and enter the information manually later.

Mek here from Open Library, thanks for your kind words.

Here! Check our @cdrini's https://openlibrary.org/barcodescanner

Wow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org itself would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to set up your own Bookwyrm instance.

What it sadly is missing is the data. My first try, I found 2 out of 3 books in a series missing, and the first book was missing data. It looks like ImportBot [0] adds them somehow, but it’s not clear how this is done and how it could be fixed as there’s no information on the user page. As much as I’d like an open solution, if I have to add every other book I read to the database first, that will make me stop using it quickly.

[0]: https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot

Hi, can I ask what books were missing? The more examples we have, the more we can update our bots to make sure these books get either imported or fixed within our search engine.

I completely understand wanting to use a service that has the books you're looking for and would also completely understand if it's too much work to type up the examples. If you'd rather not do so publicly, happy to receive your email at <mek@archive.org> and do what I can to help. Thank you!

Hey, sure: The Series is by Glynn Stewart, Scattered Stars: Evasion, Book 1 Evasion [0]

Here it already only has the printed version, not the main kindle version (his books are KDP, so sadly Amazon-exclusive). It’s also lacking the Series title (Scattered Stars: Evasion), only having the book title "Evasion".

Missing from the series are Discretion (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 2) [1] and the new Absolution (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 3) [2].

Looking through his other works, they all seem to only have the print version.

I’m also not sure if the ImportBot [3] is official, or just one huge contributor, but it could really do with some kind of information, including how something like this could be fixed, or if it can.

[0]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL26413643W/Evasion

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B57FV55Q

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C6YV8JDK

[3]: https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot

I have been using the Open Library app for almost a year now. I am very satisfied with it.

After GR removed the ability to add books manually by users and added stringent rules for them to be added to consideration by "librarians", I stopped using GR.

I read a lot of obscure books that often don't have ISBN or an webpage (!). I can't track them or add them! It was so unfair.

So, I moved to OpenLibrary and have been using it ever since.

That's awesome. May I ask, for pre-ISBN books, do you typically look up books by title? What do you do with books when you find them? What is your primary use case / reason? Is it as a reference library (of things to read)? Keeping track of reading?

Yes, by title. And I often find out about them from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I also find out about a great deal of books from other books, either mentioned or cited/referred to.

I read some books cover to cover, and some are kept as references. Books are mainly on Math, Philosophy, and History. There are other topics, too.

I read in 4 languages and GR is very Anglo-centric. That's another issue.

I wanted to track my to-read and read for every book that I found.

I cannot do that with GR anymore.

(I am unsure to whether you are asking about my use case about the sites or the books. So I answered both.)

very helpful, thank you. Good to learn international use case is working okay for you (I know we can improve). If you're not on our slack already, feel free to email me @ <mek@archive.org> -- you're welcome to ask questions and weigh so we can continue to try to move in the right direction for you and others.

This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".

Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house, good fucking luck. They literally won't make the publication available to you if they decide. Some works are only available for performance (i.e. if you're allowed to play this music, they "rent" the sheet to you) and no option to study the written work for other authors. It's excruciatingly difficult and holds the entire field back multiple, multiple decades. People write about ideas that were already explored and in circulation almost 4 decades ago because it's likely impossible to read their works.

Let me not even begin to talk to you about finding papers (analyses of other artists' works, musicology etc) if you're not affiliated with a university. You need a fortune to keep up with the field, or be arrrg (and it's not easy to find musicology papers in SciHub compared to other fields).

In this aspect we're significantly worse than how things were back in 1800s, 1900s or early 2000s.

> god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house

One of the most striking developments in the last 20 years is that so many of those European publishers are making a lot of their study scores free to read online. Apparently they have given up trying to make money from ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan of a somewhat lesser-known European avant-garde composer, I despaired that it would cost many, many thousands of euro to buy the study scores of all his pieces. Now they are right there for free on the publisher’s website.

Otherwise, piracy largely fills the gap, although many composers have some famous piece, the score of which is impossible to ever see. Boulez’s Répons and …explosante-fixe… are my usual examples of this – all the rest of his scores have circulated in pirate circles for well over a decade. Someting like Magnus Lindberg’s KRAFT is probably not easily found because its score is a meter tall and therefore difficult to scan.

Hmm I'll be honest, I always have very difficult time finding both of the options you listed. Not aware of any publishing house that share contemporary sheet music for free, nor do I have a good source for sheet music piracy. For piracy, I try the standard sources such as Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, Google "X PDF" etc... and almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.

Universal Edition, Edition Wilhelm Hansen (now part of Wise Music Classical, I think) and Boosey & Hawkes are examples of publishers who have put up a lot of scores by 20th century composers for free. The Finnish Music Information Centre website has many scores by Finnish composers of recent decades.

With regard to pirated scores, that mainly happened on filesharing networks like Soulseek and DC++.

> almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.

Why don’t you just write to them and ask for a PDF? As you know, composers are usually happy to hear of any interest in their music, and (just like academics and their research papers) they don’t always agree with their scores being “behind a paywall” for personal use.

A necessary evil as long as the publishing industry continues to have a choke-hold on copyright law. IA recently lost a lawsuit trying to fight this “digital copies must be lent like physical objects” nonsense.

It's actually a lot worse than that, you're mistaken. IA recently lost a lawsuit that argued that. The court ruled that when a digital copy is shared "a new copy is made" on the computer of the person shared, so you can't even do the common practice of buying 3 physical copies of a book and digitally sharing 3 copies at any given time. It's because if you have 3 physical copies of a book, once you share it digitally 3 times, you already exhausted your privilege and not entitled to those 3 copies any more. It makes absolutely no sense, and makes US Copyright law unreasonably and extremely maximalist, even though US copyright law was already relatively maximalist compared to other countries. We live in the dark ages.

More information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2aowF0jUw

This unfortunately isn't up to them, its the publishers that are enforcing this arbitrary restriction. In fact, IA landed in some preeeety hot water recently for fudging the rules on this very thing [0]. If the IA could get away with handling out an infinite amount of e-books I'm sure they absolutely would.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-archive-l...

Looks like they integrate with existing open sources for books, like OpenLibrary: https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/adding-books.html

It fetches data from the public APIs of openlibrary.org and inventaire.io. From my point of view, inventaire is really great as it synchronizes with wikidata and is far better at not duplicating works or authors.

I _think_ it's just things users have added. This is a fediverse app. It's not some centralized list of books that people are working from. It's not limited to English books, or even US books.

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