ISBN Visualization

144 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by Cider9986
(annas-archive.gd)

23 Comments

comrade1234

9 hours ago

I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that. It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots.

So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.

Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.

kace91

9 hours ago

It's very strange to me how small Spanish is there.

Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.

sfRattan

3 hours ago

Piracy of anything other than live streams of La Liga games... For those, Spain shuts down whole IP ranges and cripples the Internet at large while the game is live.

ghighi7878

5 hours ago

Spanish is second largest by people but not by revenue

fakefish

4 hours ago

The bookshelf is nice, but I'd love to be able to read the titles more easily - maybe rotate by 90 degrees?

rosstex

5 hours ago

This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world

C-x_C-f

5 hours ago

That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression.

In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.

To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).

squigz

3 hours ago

There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.

ZenDroid

10 hours ago

How much can you zoom it? Yes.

implode7569

9 hours ago

Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.

atulvi

10 hours ago

Is there a similar one for IP?

kobbs

7 hours ago

https://vad.solutions/ipmap/

gzread

6 hours ago

Crazy how much more IPv6 space RIPE NCC allocated than ARIN. Really shows off their countries' different stances on innovation.

p-e-w

33 minutes ago

I think it’s even crazier that a visible slice of the address space that is supposed to last for the rest of humanity’s future has already been allocated.

shevy-java

10 hours ago

One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general).

I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.

flexagoon

10 hours ago

> I hope they can fix this in the long run.

There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.

You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to

layer8

8 hours ago

In my experience, the availability of anything that isn’t popular or computer nerd-adjacent from before the age of ebooks is very hit and miss on AA.

chcardoz

10 hours ago

this is really cool!

FrustratedMonky

7 hours ago

This is really nice.

When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected, nice touch.