ISBN Visualization

There is a bounty for improving the visualization[0].

[0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

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.

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 :)

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.

Blocked in Germany by CUII https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/

A lot of errors like "resolvePublishers(978-0): SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern." are blocking view on mobile…

How much can you zoom it? Yes.

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.

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

Is there a similar one for IP?

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

This is really nice.

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

Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.

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.

this is really cool!