UriForBook - Raymond Yee's Wiki

I come back to problem of what URL to provide for a book so that others can most easily manipulate thet book information. I often discuss books on my weblogs and wiki and have long wanted a definitive and neutral way to identify a particular book, a "

definitive URI for books", as Kellan Elliott-McCrea (a.k.a. Laughing Meme) puts it.

It seems that the de facto standard for indentifying books on the Web is to link to its amazon.com page (providing that page exists). This state of affair is not surprising given how easy and attractive amazon.com has made linking to its pages. The book pages are typically attractive and informative, full of reviews. Amazon.com is easy and fast to search and provides an API to boot. When allconsuming.net was still primarily about books, it spidered weblogs for links to amazon.com (and other book sites). The new technoratic.com tracks new technorati.com tracks popular books, "ordered by new links to Amazon in the last 48 hours".

I have certainly done my share of linking to amazon.com to reference books. However, there are good reasons why linking to amazon.com is less than ideal. As LaughingMeme writes:

And there are reasons not to link to Amazon, primarily I don't want people buying their books from Amazon but from their local bookstores! Also you are: bombarded with ads for People's magazine, Epson printers, and clean underwear, tracked and indexed, and have handed over the keys to controlling conversations about books to a single corporation who aspire to be just like Walmart, not the what I look for in a Muse.

To provide myself a place other than amazon.com to which to link for books, I have also experimented with my own little cgi script (e.g., http://raymondyee.net/projects/biblio/bookInfo.py?isbn=0520237048) that returns links to a variety of book-related sources (including amazon.com, Library of Congress, the Berkeley Public Library, melvyl) given an ISBN. I've made it easy for me to generate links to the script on my wiki through a macro. (e.g., [[BookWithISBN(0520237048,"Introduction to California Plant Life")]] generates Introduction to California Plant Life. Although placing such links to raymondyee.net reflects my sense of books as items available from many sources, the links will not be readily reconizable to search engines such as technorati.com as pointers to books.

I've decided to improve my bookInfo page because it would be behooves us in the library/cultural heritage communities to find better ways to link to books. I also need a place to experiment with various ideas of mine.

On the smaller scale, I'd like to:

Allow customization of the links that come up. I link, for example, to the Berkeley Public Library -- but why should readers who have no interest in the Berkeley Public Library see that link? Ideally, I'd like a user to add any link that makes use of the ISBN. It would be great to find or create a directory of such services. For instance, I should make it easier to link to isbn.nu if one would like.
Link to redlightgreen. I'm not sure whether the link to Orndufff's book is as simple as http://redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=search&SRCHBY=identifiers&SRCHTERM=0520237048
Explore the use of Latent OpenURLs in HTML in this context. We have book information. Let the user route that information in any way he or she chooses. See Main Articles: 'Opening up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery', Ariadne Issue 43 for more context.
Figure how how to think of this problem in the context of the SemanticWeb and RDF.
Add a technorati link for book discussion in the blogging world. e.g., http://www.technorati.com/search/www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520237048 links to discussion on the book with ISBN 0520237048
Decide on whether to retain the link to allconsuming.net, which the last time I checked, does not work.

On a larger scale, I might want to:

Do some more research on communal efforts to create a definitive Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for books. Do many people even care about the issue? Are librarians content with people linking to amazon.com as a way of pointing to a book for the lack of other places to point to? If not, what would we rather have people link to?
Turn bookInfo.py into a real service that I can rally others to use. Obviously, the cgi script is not the place for others in search of a definitive URI for books to use. What would it take to make the page the definitive site? I'd be glad to have Library of Congress or some big library or a meta-library system like OCLC take over this job. But until I can convince a major organization to do so, what can I do to rally some use around a system?.
Get beyond ISBNs.to handle books that don't have ISBNs and for a service to identify related works.

Linking to Open WorldCat now works

I had wanted to:

Figure out how to link to the Open WorldCat system at OCLC, which is what the big players Google and Yahoo and other partners are doing. When can others play? Specifically, how I can programmatically generate the Open WorldCat link that corresponds to "Introduction to California Plant Life" whose ISBN is 0520237048. Now I can do a search on Google scholar and pull the URL for "Library Search" to get a working link....but I would guess that OCLC and/or google would not like others' doing so. (I may need to re-ask a previously posed question to Lorcan Dempsey.)

Lorcan wrote about exactly how to link to OCLC in Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Book handles, pointing to Link directly to an ISBN/ISSN. I've made changes to the ScholarsBox and to the bookInfo.py script to support linking to Open WorldCat. See, for example, Introduction to California Plant Life