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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lunchboxhero (talk | contribs) at 12:07, 1 November 2005 (removed two-year old entries and refactored). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

See Wikipedia:ISBN for further discussion of this page, how to use it, etc.

Suggested additions:

Geoff Burling suggested (http://www.abebooks.com) on the mailing list.

be bold! :)

How clever is hidden code?

How clever is the code hidden behind the Book Sources page? Can it do different stuff according to the value of the ISBN passed to it? I'm thinking about the various sites referenced which say they are only good for certain ranges of ISBN: any way to display them selectively or do we just leave it to the user? Phil 16:46, Jan 13, 2004 (UTC)

IMHO, leave it to the user 'coz users may aware of other book stores too - Rrjanbiah 09:50, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

added Christian Book Distributors

I have added Christian Book Distributors' ISBN search to the list. I have found them to be an excellent src 4 Christian Books, Bibles, and music. As for the Christians they serve, they are very NPOV. That is, they serve Protestants and Catholics, and others. -iHoshie 06:17, Mar 24, 2004 (UTC)

If so, how? Tim Shepard 23:21, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Fundraising through Increased Book Linking

I'm very new to this so forgive me this is a yawn inducingly old idea.

I've noted the way books are to be cited, and the page which clicking an ISBN number takes you to.

I also note that this provides a source of funding as some click-thrus will give Wikipedia money for any sales made on referral.

For the uninitiated, you can see an example here.

What I was wondering is, would there be any value in having a Book Citation Drive to push up the number of book sales that Wikipedia earns commission on?

Of course, we would want to make sure additions are relevant - you can see the 3 I've added to the Dad's Army article at Further Reading

I figured if you had a splash on the front page and some other reminders strategically placed, it might cause an increase in citations and funds.

If you wanted to be gung-ho about it, Wikipedia could be a lot more aggressive in funneling click-thrus to those retailers Wikipedia can get money from - but I suspect that's against the spirit of Wikipedia. --bodnotbod 01:45, May 1, 2004 (UTC)

Well, shortly after the amazon partner link was added as an experiment Jimbo declared the experiment as being over as the income generated was quite small - and probably also because some wikipedians issued bad feelings about working together with amazon, as the patent policy of amazon is somewhat controversial. However that link wasn't removed even after the experiment was declared over, so maybe Jimbo should check again if it gained any significant income since.
But even if there were no affiliation programs used, adding books in a "resources" or "further reading" section makes perfect sense, as well as adding the ISBN for books which are listed already but lack that number. I myself do that regularily, but I limit myself to books I have read, so I can recommend that book to a topic. Searching through amazon to find a book related to the topic of an article just to add book title is not a good idea IMHO. andy 19:58, 1 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
But Price Owl has a note saying it pays commission too. How about encouraging that? I agree books should be added on genuine merit (which means adding ones you've actually read, preferably). --bodnotbod 02:14, May 4, 2004 (UTC)
Don't forget about pages that are actually legitimately about books, like Cerebus the Aardvark---there's only one edition of the phonebooks; I added links to all the ones I could find. It's not only good for Wikipedia, it's actually helpful to me to have those links there. Grendelkhan 15:02, 2004 May 6 (UTC)
How can I take this idea further? I think it's swamped here. I need the ear of someone who can take this up. It is FUNDING! we're talking about. Surely everybody should have an interest in that. --bodnotbod 23:46, May 6, 2004 (UTC)

rearranging commercial and library sites

The number of libraries that the users can choose has grown dramatically, and the Worldcat + Google is SUPER useful. Do folks think that it would be more wiki to place the free (as in beer) sources before the commercial sites. Lunchboxhero 01:53, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

Last publisher ISBN redirect

I suggest link a ISBN number to the last publisher of the book which ISBN appears as a link.

Later, the user can buy it in the store s/he wants.

This is very interesting to read easily about the book without type too much ;)

This is, from the wikipedia ISBN link to the publisher´s website page about the book. Like search enginee, we can use Google ISBN tool or similar, like in the wikipedia page searching.

Additions, WorldCat, Wikibooks

Hi, I added Harvard HOLLIS since this is one of the biggest union catalogs in the U.S. (by number of books, not number of libraries). I also added San Francisco Public Library for people local here in SF who want to find books.

The public access to WorldCat is a great idea, but I've found a number of books just in my work over the last week that are in fact in WorldCat, but don't come up on the WorldCat+Google search. Anyone know why this is? Google hasn't indexed it all?

I noticed that on the wikibooks server, you can't edit the Book sources page, and there aren't many book sources listed there (only commercial providers too). Where is the wikibooks village pump, or who should I talk to about this?

Thanks --User:Chinasaur

Slovenian books

Could someone arrange this magic-thing for Slovenian libraries. The main catalogue is already added. Of course it is possible to use it in English. The numbers used are 86 and 961 and are already added. --Eleassar777 09:45, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

xISBN

I've added an xISBN link, to find other editions of the same book.

The service is a little raw since it just returns a list of numbers. Someone with appropriate privileges (and PHP or javascript knowledge) could write something to replace the xISBN output with a few ISBN links, inserting them on this page (or creating another special page). Tobu 11:23, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Alphabetical Order

I've put the list of libraries by country in alphabetical order. It didn't seem to have any logical order before, going Canada, USA, UK/Ireland, Hong Kong, Australia... I've also expanded out the language two-letter codes into the full country names. If this is undesirable for one reason or another, feel free to revert. - Mark 09:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Non-ISBN linked pages?

There's a couple of links on Special:Booksources which don't contain a MAGICNUMBER string - ie, all we're doing is linking to the catalogue itself. Is current practice to leave these in or cut them out? I assume the latter, since the idea is to use it to find a specific book by ISBN, but thought I'd better check... if no objections, I'll prune them out in a day or so. Shimgray 01:21, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've commented out another handful with no MAGICNUMBER Shimgray 21:23, 17 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Experimental

I've removed this since it doesn't work. It only links to the article about OpenURL and gives no link to a place anyone can get details of the book they were looking for via Special:Booksources

<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.isbn=MAGICNUMBER">Linking to Libraries via Latent [[OpenURL]]</span>

Angela. July 2, 2005 18:25 (UTC)

It works if you install a firefox [4] plugin (or another type of activating agent), and if you have access to a library running a link server.


One way to understand this is to imagine that every library in the world had their own book sources page. Right now there are over 1,000 libraries that do this via OpenURL link servers- far too many to list on the book sources page! If you have a better suggestion on how to do this, please let us know

I'm going to put this back with a better explanation- there's not really any other way to try it.


openly July 14, 2005

Use of United Kingdom/Ireland

Is there a reason why the UK entry is listed as United Kingdom/Ireland? If there was a formal collaboration between the two countries then this would make sense, otherwise, if nobody has any objection, I'll change it to just United Kingdom.

Non-ISBN books

Hi all.

As an side-result of some rather heavy-handed editing I did last night, there's a discussion at User:Shimgray/ASIN about whether or not the use of ASIN codes - Amazon-specific identifying numbers - are useful for circumstances where no ISBN is available, or whether they do more harm than good. I'm trying to solicit comments so we can reach a consensus on this.

Your thoughts'd be appreciated. Thanks, Shimgray 13:14, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Linking to books via urn:isbn

Greetings, all.

The IETF defines a standard method of referencing books in hypertext documents via the urn:isbn namespace. Some browsers and extensions already support this. As it becomes more widely implemented, Wikipedia users will come to expect that when they click on an ISBN in Wikipedia, the link will be handled by the browser rather than by this special Wikipedia page. In the interim, I thought it would be best to provide a urn: link at the top of this article (see sample text below, which would have replaced the first paragraph). However, it appears that Mediawiki does not recognize links of the form [urn:…]. I'll file a bug report with Mediawiki and hopefully this will be resolved soon.

If you are using a web browser which supports the standard urn:isbn namespace, following the link urn:isbn:MAGICNUMBER will provide purchasing or library information and other data about the book with the ISBN MAGICNUMBER.
Otherwise, you may be able to find such information on one of the websites below. Use Special:Booksources to search for another ISBN.

—Psychonaut 17:55, 13 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is Library Size Important?

I am wondering this because I could easily add my regional library system to this list, but I'm not sure if it would be appreciated...  ;)

-zorblek 10 September 2005

This list should be limited to national or state libaries. If we all started adding regional libraries the list would become too large and unusable.

---GregH 9 October 2005

See, this is the thing. The New York Public Library is immense - half a million books in Slavic languages alone, half a million maps, four specialised research libraries, eighty-five branches, fifty million items of which twenty are books - it doesn't just put most university libraries behind it, it outweighs a lot of national libraries. Yet it's only one of three public library services in a single American city. Making broad judgements on the "level" isn't helping here. Shimgray | talk | 13:44, 9 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

half.com

I'm going to try to add a link to half.com. Jdavidb 20:13, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This did not work. Punching the ISBN into half.com gives a simple URL which I thought could be used, but apparently it converts the ISBN internally into a "cpid" which I guess is some half.com/ebay proprietary identifier. Shucks. They could make it so easy... Jdavidb 20:21, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I took a look at the link that isbn.nu (which searches many commercial sites) uses, and was able to adapt it to work. -- Norvy (talk) 02:46, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]


How hard would it be to include for each ISBN a list of articles which reference it? (Or am I missing something obvious?) Danny Yee 10:21, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I put up a working link. Lunchboxhero 12:00, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

¡El esta chengado!... not sure if this is browser-specific or what (I'll post a followup from Firefox at home), but at work, under Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180, the LOC link is screwed up; the URL [5] tries to include ISBN, a space, and the ISBN... which conveniently causes MediaWiki to try to substitute in a link to Wikipedia:Book_sources... you get the idea.

I tried substituting the encoding characters for "I", "S", "B", "N", but that led to the same result (looks fine in Preview, is jacked up in the final page rendering). I'm tempted to go <nowiki> and create a straight a href-style link, but that'll look funny to future editors. Anyway, if anyone knows why this is doing it or how to interface more cleverly with the Library of Congress, feel free... I tried to use a different search link from their site, but only succeeded in creating a perma-link to one particular book. They do some sort of transformation on the original URL which makes it very difficult to test. nae'blis (talk)

::edit:: Got it working now, I believe; the book does have to be in the LoC, of course, but it formats correctly on the special page, and links correctly to the search engine (I just tested it on a Judy Blume book). nae'blis (talk) 01:43, 13 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Or not - apparently they require a session ID embedded in the search string, and it times out after five minutes of inactivity. I'm not sure how to correct this particular aspect of the problem, since I can't get at the URL they wish me to send in from the outside (stripping the session ID [6] results in a URL that never loads) going to comment this out for now, as broken functionality < no attempt at fuctionality. nae'blis (talk) 02:00, 13 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Books available from free resources

I added this section specifically to place BookCrossing inside. I'll admit up front that I'm a BookCrosser (as it were), so I'm not a neutral party. But it doesn't really belong in the booksellers section, as books are regularly traded just for the shipping costs (or less). I imagine there are other free resources out there. Maybe religious outreach programs, and the likes... I don't know. Bookandcoffee 19:48, 20 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bypassing Book Sources page through user settings

The book sources page has gotten wonderfully long, but I think that it does not serve those people who frequently look up ISBN numbers to have to load a large page when they probably want to search the same library or bookstore each time. It would be a wonderful feature to have an option in user settings to set the library or bookstore that will be attempted when they click on an ISBN number. This seems something that would be done through javascript. Does anybody know of a similar function that could be used as a model to add this function?

Lunchboxhero

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