Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs(lars.ingebrigtsen.no)
lars.ingebrigtsen.no
Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2025/04/17/perplexingly-book-learned-emacs/
15 comments
Recognized the domain; Lars' documentation of the Ding! NNTP reader in emacs from... 30(?) years ago was one of the few pieces of doc that had me audibly laughing as I read it.
Is there really not some API out there that knows about all published books? Paid, if necessary?
There is absolutely not such an api. For one thing, nobody actually knows because nothing stops random people from publishing a book at any time.
For another, the major book publishers like amazon want to prevent anyone else from having their data.
Beyond that, book metadata is probably the least standardized thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
Titles, subtitles, editions, editors vs authors, series...
For another, the major book publishers like amazon want to prevent anyone else from having their data.
Beyond that, book metadata is probably the least standardized thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
Titles, subtitles, editions, editors vs authors, series...
I think there are, the author says so, but according to author they don’t make clear if a book is a new edition, translation, etc of a previously published book. So getting a list of published works wherein “A Book Title” is a single result and “A Book Title 2nd edition”, “A Book Title 3rd edition”, etc are not listed in addition to “A Book Title”, doesn’t exist. I would think it’s possible to write a layer of logic that takes a list of published books and removes extra editions, translations, etc to get what the author wants but perhaps the problem is more difficult than I realize
we built this "work-level" catalog at Margins [1] -- 12mo+ of work -- book data is the messiest data I've worked with in my 10+ years of building things with data
[1] iOS app to track and discover books: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718
[1] iOS app to track and discover books: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718
I spent a couple of years working on this as a hobby and, yeah, book metadata is difficult to explain just how irregular it actually is. It might actually be worse than people names.
That being said, the reason I was working on this was because I wanted a simple and effective way to get alerted to new books published by authors I want to track, can this work for that?
That being said, the reason I was working on this was because I wanted a simple and effective way to get alerted to new books published by authors I want to track, can this work for that?
As a feature within our app, probably Q2/Q3 this year; we want to finish backfilling historical books before turning actual notifications on
As an API for you to query yourself for free, not for a while (but on the long-term roadmap!)
As an API for you to query yourself for free, not for a while (but on the long-term roadmap!)
When is a book the same as another?
It'd probably be easier to scrape wikipedia or goodreads.
The author believes that LLMs are toys and sets out to show that you can get some useless results if that's what you're looking for. Tiresome polemical exercise, but it does have the virtue of brevity.
https://github.com/karthink/gptel