Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
19 comments
·February 1, 2025rsecora
phiresky
That's not entirely accurate since AA has separate databases for books they have as files, and one for books they only know the metadata of. The metadata database comes from various sources and as far as I know is pretty complete.
Black should mostly be sections that have no assigned books
youssefabdelm
Does anyone know if there's an API where I could plug in ISBN and get all the libraries in the world that have that book?
I know Worldcat has something like this when you search for a book, but the API, I assume is only for library institutions and I'm not a library nor an institution.
keepamovin
Wow, that is really cool. What an amazing passion project and what an incredible resource!
Zooming in you can see the titles, the barcode and hovering get a book cover and details. Incredible, everything you could want!
Some improvement ideas: checkbox to hide the floating white panel at top left, and the thing at top right. Because I really like to "immerse" in these visualizations, those floaters lift you out of that experience to some extent, limiting fun and functionality for me a bit.
255
When you zoom in it's book shelves! That's so cool
MeteorMarc
Possible improvement: paperback and bounded editions are shown next to each other, but look the same. Do not know about the e-books.
bambax
I did find my micro-publishing house relatively easily... Very cool! ;-)
celltalk
This is library of Alexendria but in digital format. Amazing work!
grues-dinner
Awesome. A real life Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/
Out of all the VR vapourware, a real life infinite library or infinite museum is the one thing that could conceivably get me dropping cash.
Hnrobert42
I didn't appreciate the difficulty of the Fly to Book path calculation until I read the description!
siddharthgoel88
What an amazing visualization.
zeristor
I guess the 0 prefix for books in the UK of youre just had the 978 prefix added in front of it ages ago when they were running out of digits
tekkk
Wow, what a cool little project, congratulations on shipping!
artninja1988
Did they get the bounty?
vallode
I believe the bounty is closed but they haven't announced the winner(s).
Impressive presentation.
Note: The presentation reflects the contents of Anna's archive exclusively, rather than the entire ISBN catalog. There is a discernible bias towards a limited range of languages, due to Anna's collection bias to those languages. The sections marked in black represent the missing entries in the archive.