What does HackerNews think of openlibrary?
One webpage for every book ever published!
They're also truly open source: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/
I got it setup and working for open library (https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary) and I think some people have been quite happy to not have to download them many GB of docker images to their machine to be able to do small tweaks.
Open Library in particular has a very active repo with lots of volunteers, a weekly community call, and a rather accessible codebase. https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
If anyone knows webpack well would LOVE to have this dev-facing issue resolve to auto reload CSS https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4955
Open Library was started by @aaronsw.
We're a library catalog with 3M+ books to read & borrow.
We've been around for 15 years, not going anywhere.
We're open source and non profit: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
We defend patron privacy, offer free APIs, and release all public data openly: https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
Most projects on this page have likely used our data.
We have a Reading Log and several other more substantial features in the works.
Our catalog spans more than 20M works: https://openlibrary.org/stats
You can help! https://openlibrary.org/volunteer
For an invite, please send me an email at [email protected] or go to: https://openlibrary.org/volunteer
# APIs & Data Dumps
- https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
- https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books
- https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps monthly data dumps for if you need bulk access and the APIs are not enough.
# Spread the word
Also, if you want to help raise awareness of this resource, please help us get the word out on twitter!
1. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338185940469051392
2. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338186553915367425
# Issues
Thank you all for helping us discover some issues with our goodreads importer and search (recently migrated to Python3 + thanks @cdrini et al for these fast bug fixes! If you notice an problem, please help open an issue here: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
# Learn More
- https://archive.org/details/openlibrary-tour-2020/openlibrar... if you want to learn more about Open Library, here's a short intro vid.
- https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary if you want to follow on github.
And yeah, searching needs some work! That's on my task list for this month. Just this Friday I spent most of my day working on updating our search engine, Solr, from 3.6 to 8.7 (wip!). But search is a _BIG_ pain point. We're a small team with a big long list of things to do, but we are making progress! This year we updated to Python 3, switched most of our production environments to docker-based for easier deploys and to give open source contributors more control of production infra, added reading history stats for users, added a new interface for exploring books, worked on a novel recommendation system, added text selection to the online BookReader for public domain books, added GoodReads importing, grew our community, added the ability to search by classification, and much, much more (you can see highlights from our year here: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3891 ).
There is still _definitely_ a lot to do, but I think the biggest reason worth using/contributing to Open Library is likely its open source community. Anyone can jump in and help make improvements to the system (as they very often do!). Personally, I think it's more likely that a system with a community will survive/flourish than one maintained by a single person (I also wondered whether I should just create my own before contributing to and now working on Open Library!). And there are also loads of different tasks associated with a site like OL, which would be impossible for me to do if I was going it alone.
If you would be interested, checkout the GitHub repo: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary . It's very active, and you can get an idea of how we work :)
https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
The project is also open source, and you can find the code (and contribute!) on GitHub: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of books which you may track like goodreads.
Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source! https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
Open Library has a very strong volunteer tribe of book-loving librarians, developers, and designers working to make the project better for our community.
We meet once a week at 11:30am PT. Ask me for the link: [email protected]
RIGOROUS BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: We're also cultivating a 2nd non-profit open source experiment called TheBestBookOn.com (it leverages Open Library's catalog) which allows book-lovers to ask for or make rigorous book recommendations:
https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-Project/TheBestBookOn.co...
It's a very early prototype (we discuss development during our weekly Open Library call). It's being organized by Lauren Milliken, Aasif Khan, and myself and we'd love more contributors to join the discussion: [email protected]
We're also an open source project [https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary] and happy to collaborate w/ folks on such projects. I'm personally very inspired by the https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/ Booklamp project; building a genome for every book and surfacing as much content as we can to help patrons discover citations, quotes, and other useful content which would inform their reading choices and otherwise be completely inaccessible behind a borrow.
If anyone is interested in helping us move the needle on such an effort, please do get in touch and we'd be glad to invite you to Open Library's slack channel.