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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That's my issue with attempts to 3D-ify viz. Unless you are actually modeling a 3D volume, like medical imaging or CAD, the added "forced exploration" of 3D simply hides insights.

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 Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site, so what they are showcasing is how compleat (and brazen) their theft (and attendant lack of compensation) is.

This would be far more interesting if it were based on an hierarchical system such as LoC, and instead afforded an interface for accessing legitimately available books as are available from https://www.gutenberg.org/ or listed at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ or worked on at: https://www.wikibooks.org/

> 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 think the target audience holding differing political views is really a valid critcism of the project. It should be evaluated in the context and audience it was created for.

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.

Yes, but dealing with that politically would be made easier by having the moral high ground.

Not really, because it depends on the basis of morality. In fact, this 'morality' problem is shown in the existence of libraries in the US.

Is a book a collective good? Or property? In the US the answer is 'both' in an awkward way. But the US does know that having books behind a paywall is not in society's best interest.

And in reality 99% of the books will never be read, which makes their 'value' as property suspect.

If so few books are to be read, then why is it so difficult to pay for those which are?

> 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.

Questions of compensation and ownership are one of the most political questions of all.

What exactly do you think communist revolutions were revolting over?

How to employ and feed and compensate the masses.

> This would be far more interesting if it were based on an hierarchical system such as LoC, and instead afforded an interface for accessing legitimately available books

Isn't this exactly what Open Library does?

Given that "Textbooks" are separated out and "Animals" and "Childrens' Books" and "Health & Wellness" are top-level categories? and that it mixes in books which are not available for download, not really.

The UI is not all that great either.

I would like to see:

- an hierarchical list with a hierarchy which actually makes sense and truly organizes knowledge

- of legitimately available downloadable books

- which has a nice UI

but it's far more important that LLMs have training data without consideration of recompense than any other consideration.

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