Open Library Blog

I just stumbled on a beautiful, recently-scanned book about snowflakes, published in 1863. Apart from its gorgeous illustrations, the author’s opinions about snowflakes are also fascinating.

By the way, the other day we added a little link on any Internet Archive pages that are echoed in Open Library that sends you straight to our open, editable record for that item, so, if you’re surfing around the Archive’s Texts collection and you find a book we have a record for, you can just jump across and - if you’re so inclined - help to flesh out the information we have about it.

The even more interesting thing about this is that Hank (who coded up the stuff from the Archive side) simply has to construct a URL at Open Library containing an Internet Archive item ID, like this:

http://openlibrary.org/ia/snowflakeschapte00warr

This is a small step towards something much more awesome. (We should note that what makes this work is that we’re just “across the hall” from Hank, so we were able to do a little testing and tweaking to make sure the link was offered only when we could count on there being an Open Library page for the book, but still!) The hope is that external sites can send along, say, and ISBN, or an LCCN identifier to poke into Open Library and see if we have a record.

The next logical step is to make a web service that can handle this sort of inquiry. We don’t have that just yet, and current performance is slow, but, it’s really exciting and something we aim to strengthen. It would mean that people could query Open Library for records even if they don’t know an Open Library identifier (but have an alternative identifier that we know about). The current list of identifiers we can record are: Dewey, LC, ISBN 10, ISBN 13, LCCN, IA & OCLC.

Another wish is to open up the sorts of identifiers that you might attach to an Open Library catalog record, for example, from our friends over at LibraryThing, or GoodReads, or any number of awesome book sites out there. Things get interesting if you consider the possibility that there may never be a canonical identifier for a book, but rather that there will always be many different ones. That consideration allows you to open up a pipe to any identifiers we can find, which makes for many more potential connections.

Snowflakes, indeed.

Nearly 11,000 Yiddish books (half of all Yiddish books ever published) recently went online through the Internet Archive in cooperation with the National Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library. As part of this project, we’ve upgraded the Internet Archive Book Reader to support the right-to-left page progression of Yiddish books. Here is an example.

We’ll be working to adjust the metadata of our books from other right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, and others, so that they will work in the book reader, too.

Although the book reader is now available to view only through archive.org, we are working to bring the book reader to openlibrary.org as well. Stay tuned!

Open Library recently launched a web demonstration designed to illustrate how Internet Archive book collections can be viewed on the OLPC XO Laptop.

We invite you to take a look!

It is still in the early stages, and is built on open source software using an embeddable AJAX reader and a software component known as Carousel which scrolls through the collection of books on the right.

We would like to have feedback on how to improve the user experience of this demonstration and its underlying components for users of the OLPC XO and Open Library.

There are a few known bugs in the collections (i.e., Carousel) navigation:

• A user cannot quickly scroll to the top and bottom of the collection
• A user cannot view multiple collections, and sub-collections, or filter book selections on a variable such as author or subject
• More books should be revealed in the collections carousel on screen rotate
• Book titles should be truncated so they do not break into two lines (this interferes with the viewable area of the carousel)

At this time, it is not fully functional in tablet mode on the XO yet - this has dependencies on the GnuBook reader (the embeddable reader that enables scrolling through the individual book pages). We need it to:

• Respond to the arrow keys when in tablet mode (book and collection navigation)
• The book should zoom to fit width in the book viewable area
• A two-page view on default is preferable to a single page view

We created an OLPC bundle for browsing books offline on the XO. It currently contains 5 books, and uses low resolution images to improve download speed:

Demo: http://openlibrary.org/static/olpc_bundle/openlibrary/
Bundle: http://openlibrary.org/static/olpc_bundle/openlibrary.xol

We encourage anyone interested in these two projects to help betatest the software components. The primary focus is on GnuBook:

Documentation: http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
Bug Tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnubook/
Source Code: http://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader/tree/master

We also have a demonstration of the GnuBook reader without the Carousel navigation here.

Enjoy! (And be sure to check out a 2008 Google Summer of Code project for a Sugar app book viewer by Aleksander Kalev!)