[HN Gopher] ISBN Visualization
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ISBN Visualization
Author : Cider9986
Score : 215 points
Date : 2026-03-27 20:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (annas-archive.gd)
(TXT) w3m dump (annas-archive.gd)
| ZenDroid wrote:
| How much can you zoom it? Yes.
| chcardoz wrote:
| this is really cool!
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cdrini wrote:
| I found this on open library from 1989, if useful:
| https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5859479W/Steel_construction?...
|
| With a few other options in search:
|
| https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mo...
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| Recent publications have not yet passed the test of time.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| There is a bounty for improving the visualization[0].
|
| [0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-
| archiv...
| atulvi wrote:
| Is there a similar one for IP?
| kobbs wrote:
| https://vad.solutions/ipmap/
| gzread wrote:
| Crazy how much more IPv6 space RIPE NCC allocated than ARIN.
| Really shows off their countries' different stances on
| innovation.
| p-e-w wrote:
| 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.
| gzread wrote:
| It's 1/8 of that space and it's being allocated in big
| blocks that are expected not to run out unless humanity
| expands to the whole solar system. If it does run out,
| there are 7 tries left. More if you only use half as much
| space next time.
| implode7569 wrote:
| Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| 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.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| Imagine being sanctioned for trying to read books.
| james-bcn wrote:
| Children of Time is wonderful! I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would
| stop churning them out so quickly and write some more of the
| quality of Children of Time.
| kace91 wrote:
| 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.
| ghighi7878 wrote:
| Spanish is second largest by people but not by revenue
| sfRattan wrote:
| 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.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| It's because some books are not categorized as Spanish. They
| are just under a publisher name. For example, search for "Don
| Quijote"
| nomdep wrote:
| Very weird.
|
| Only in Spain there are 3k publishers. Argentina has 1k
| publishers.
|
| And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by
| Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This is really nice.
|
| When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected,
| nice touch.
| rosstex wrote:
| This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fakefish wrote:
| The bookshelf is nice, but I'd love to be able to read the titles
| more easily - maybe rotate by 90 degrees?
| rwoerz wrote:
| Blocked in Germany by CUII https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/
| burgerone wrote:
| Change your DNS server
| on_the_train wrote:
| Strange. People always say that Germany is connected to the
| internet and china bad, Germany good etc
| cedilla wrote:
| Strange. If you compress complex topics into one four-word
| sentence, they are not as coherent any more.
| phiresky wrote:
| Here's my article on how I built it - and also an instance hosted
| on GitHub pages if the AA domain is blocked for you:
| https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-i...
|
| Happy to answer questions as always :)
| realitylabs wrote:
| Love this!
| krick wrote:
| I remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even
| remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I
| never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty
| problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-
| publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is
| collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out
| there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's
| what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve?
| What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I
| mean, any more specifically than "some random book _probably_ in
| a given language ". I was kinda surprised when this visualization
| was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.
| functional_dev wrote:
| exactly, that map looks like a mess of random blocks...
|
| big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares
| inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy. this
| visualisation helped me to put pieces together -
| https://vectree.io/c/isbn
| phiresky wrote:
| There's a bit of an issue with the linked deployment (in my
| opinion). In the most zoomed out view you should see the first
| layer of blocks - very big blocks titled "English language",
| "French language", "German language". See
| https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ maybe. That
| makes it a bit easier to read.
|
| The point of the visualization is showing different attributes
| of books in the space of ISBNs. ISBNs correlate with country,
| publisher, and release date, that's why using it as a space is
| useful. You can clearly see the history of when blocks were
| created, which blocks are rarer than others (present in fewer
| libraries), and (on the AA hosting) which blocks are more
| present in AA vs not.
|
| In any case though, yes ISBNs as spatial data are clearly not
| perfect. Do you have any suggestions that would order the 100
| million data points better?
| max8539 wrote:
| A lot of errors like "resolvePublishers(978-0): SyntaxError: The
| string did not match the expected pattern." are blocking view on
| mobile...
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(page generated 2026-03-28 23:01 UTC)