Open Library: a wiki catalog for all
High-quality catalogs of book-related data are typically closed; the Open Library, produced by a kickass team put together by BookFinder.com friends Brewster Kahle and Aaron Swartz, could change everything. I’m excited.
Libraries rely on sources like OCLC and the Library of Congress. Ecommerce folks use sources like Muze or Bowker. Smaller online outfits like LibraryThing or ISBNdb.com work on mashed-up/crowdsourced catalogs.
But Open Library is the real thing — the beginnings of a comprehensive, well-though-out, public domain catalog of books. All books.
Check out the demo for yourself.
With the right kind of momentum behind them, we’re looking at the possibility of a groundbreaking change, and the beginnings of a project that we’ll be talking about for decades to come. I’ll be the first to tell you how incredibly difficult a project like this is, how long it’ll take to reach the kind of coverage available in the closed datasets, but getting to this stage is a huge first step in the right direction. Congrats to the entire Open Library team.
[Now reading: Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge edited by Lou Anders]