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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

Sub-pages

The list of sources has become rather unwiedly... I tried to create subpages for different areas, but it seems that the script only operates on the main page. Is there someone with the authority to make special subpages for the different continents?--Wikiwriter706 00:43, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Not Fully Functional

In some entries if one clicks on the books ISBN from the Book Sources page on Wiki, sometimesthe viewer will land on a page on worldcat, and it will state the book is not available in any library, however if one goes directly to worldcat.org and types in the same title or isbn, then one can see which Libraries have the book. This seems to also be the case with books that are bilingual in the same edition. --LAgurl 19:20, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

(edited my previous post) I took a look and it was just a matter of how worldcat receives the isbn code. I suspect that the path shifted a bit. But after initial testing it seems all is okay. --84.191.104.189 14:39, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

javascript - Bypassing Book Sources page through user settings

I've written a function that rewrites ISBN links to the url of your choice. This will allow folks to bypass Book Sources if they always want to go to the same external site every time. To enable this, copy the code and paste it in your user JS page, i.e. User:<Your User Name>/monobook.js. My script rewrites the url to amazon, but you can easily modify the script to rewrite to the url of your choice. Looking at the source of Wikipedia:Booksources can give you hints as to what that url should look like.

Lunchboxhero 12:16, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

script works great even with other pages like A9.com or your page of choice, see discussion page there

Usability - drastical ACCELERATION requested for book page-access

when one clicks a isbn link here, one wants to see the book on a page of choice (example amazon or any other selected page of choice) with first, maximum second click WITHOUT SCROLLING

today at 11 dec 2005 a frustrating 150.000 byte page opens, where one has to scroll down, HAVE TO SEARCH for amazon or your favorite book shop, HAVE TO SEARCH WHERE TO CLICK

this is a very distracting Usability

i suggest a link to the 3 most used book providers appears on first lines WITHOUT SCROLLING.

to avoid useless server load and wait time for narrow-band users i even suggest to SPLIT the page.

3 Links for Quick access, the 150.000 bytes for all who want do dig deeper with an extra link.

or best, integrate it in my preferences every registered user selects a book page of choice, no more frustrating intermediate 150.000 byte page. (150.000 bytes are a complete 100 page book) roaming 11 Dec 2005


i copied a9 search from the metalist from SOMEWHERE from this too long page on top for easy point and click,

(maybe someone replaces it by a better meta searchengine or extends line by max. 2 more direct links to the aimed isbn book)

so if one just wants to take a quick look on a book one has neither to install javascript nor need for scrolling and looking and aiming

where one has to klick and point to get ahead. roaming 15 Dec 2005

I agree with you, this page is too long and confusing. But it's a reason to improve wikipedia (reorganize the page, make subpages, whatever), not to advertise one vendor - even if A9 is of good quality. wikipedia is neutral, and even if the user came here mostly to get a link to amazon, we shouldn't support one vendor. for a Nielsen Zealot, you're quite hard to read ;-) --Marc Lacoste 16:27, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
it's a disaster; if there's only a choice between the three most popular, they will become EVEN MORE popular.
I don't understand clearly what do you mean. I think we will need to remove this A9 link, or to place it in metasearches. --Marc Lacoste 17:36, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I come to this section on usability and all I see is consensus to remove the link. I think it would be okay if we could cycle through all of the book shops which claim to have "most" available books in their catologue. If we have to prefer one then we shouldn't have the link. Manual cycling would be okay. Mozzerati 18:05, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I added a link to User:Lunchboxhero/monobook.js to top of the page, that way people can easiy find a way to set their own preferences. I will work on a patch to the Mediawiki software so that this can be set in User Preferences. Will any developers reading this page comment on this.

Lunchboxhero 16:12, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Hello, I have made a draft rewrite of the top of the Book Sources page to try to address some of these usability concerns. Please take a gander. If you want to know my thinking about the country links in the quicklinks sidebar, look at the discussion E. Pluribus Anthony and I had about making it easier to get to library sites most relevant for most of the visitors of Book Sources.

Lunchboxhero 21:02, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Canned Search Resources

OCLC Guide to Deeplinking explains how to construct urls for records in most library catalog software.

Google Print

I notice that typing in the ISBN for a book in the Google Print collection at http://print.google.com/ gives the correct result. If you want to see this for yourself, try ISBN 0521348773. Should we integrate this into this page? --Oldak Quill 23:19, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

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)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org 164.11.204.56 18:43, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I added the feature request, I searched before but didn't find it so I created it ([1]) bcartolo (talk) 02:47, 16 May 2009 (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)
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)

In way of belated answer, I think so, definitely yes. --Thomas B 02:12, 28 July 2007 (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

    • An answer to an old question: but the reason some books don't come up in Open WorldCat is that all the WorldCat records were not released to the public by OCLC -- they only gave a limited slice to the public, versus the full catalog you can find in the very expensive WorldCat subscription that your library may have. This may improve over time. worldcat.org was released recently, makes it easier to search. phoebe 21:03, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

Don't prune them, because there are a lot of books published inthe past that are not accessible with a ISBN number and only from catalogs (notably from national public libraries, or though collaboratif library exchange standard catalogs) : this includes a LOT of free books (often free as a beer for their content, and free as freedom of use of this content). ISBN number are recent invention in our history.
May be the Open Archive Initiative (OAI-PMH ?) will define a MAGIC number format for cross references between catalogs of public libraries, but for now, there is no such standard (or there are just local conventions between several cooperating libraries), and will provide a protocol for performing searches across all participating libraries and for retreiving fac-similes of these precious books using this simple number (for now the OAI-PMH just provides a mechanisms to provide various metadata info about these publications and documents).
Given that many countries alos provide copyright protection for books only if they are registered in a legal repository where it is archived, it's highly probable that the public libraries used for legal repository (dépot légal in French) of publications will cooperate to create a worldwide search engine for all kinds of publications (free and not free), using the now common OAI-PMH metadata format.
and anyway, the MAGICNUMBER is only meant to be used when there is a ISBN number in article reference. There are other number formats to consider (and anyway, the ISBN number just identifies a particular edition from a specific editor, and not the various editions that may exist for the same book, so public libraries also use other identifiers to trace the initial legal copyright owner).
Private initiatives also exist (e.g. Citeseer) verdy_p (talk) 17:27, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
I've commented out another handful with no MAGICNUMBER Shimgray 21:23, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I've removed all the ones added since the last check - removed them, rather than commented out, to cut down on the time to load the page. This should list all removals. Shimgray | talk | 13:20, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

This is wrong: links without MAGICNUMBER should be fixed (if possible) and not simply removed. 17:18, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

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 [2] 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

I still don't know what this does. Unless you give a better explanation than that section will be removed.

User:Lunchboxhero

COinS markup convention now stable and moved to be adjacent to user bypass script which has exactly the same purpose. COinS markup is now invisible except for agents that know how to read the metadata- see [3] COinS openly

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.

As I understand it, The Uk and Ireland have an agreement regarding legal deposit libraries. These are the libraries where a copy of every book publishend in a country is required to be deposited. There are 7 in the Uk and ireland, inculding the british library in london, the bodlean in oxford, its equivalent in cambridge, and libraries in edinburgh, cardiff, I think belfast and Dublin. All the books published in either country are required to deposit a copy each with all seven. Dolive21 10:36, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)
I would go with practical usefulness to our users rather than rules about whether certain types of libraries are allowed or not. For instance, I don't think the Denver public library system is that big, but it's damned helpful if you live in the mountains instead of on the coasts. — Laura Scudder ☎ 22:59, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

half.com

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

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)

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)


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)

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

¡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 [4] 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)

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 [5] 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)

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)


ToC

Why is "Metasearches of many bookseller sites" a subsection of "English books"? These links are useful for finding books in any language. dab (ᛏ) 14:14, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Sort by Country not Continent

Hello, I think it would be better to have the TOC done by country rather than by Continent and then country. Input wanted before I make the change. Thanks SirIsaacBrock 17:56, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Why POST and not GET?

If I go to http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Special:Booksources, type an ISBN and press Go, because the form uses POST, I come back to the same URL, and can't bookmark the page. The form should use GET because:

  • The request doesn't modify anything on the server.
  • Being able to bookmark the resulting page is nice.

--Graue 03:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

This is being looked into per bug 8164 and should be modified soon. 164.11.204.56 18:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

It might be better if we could link to it with internal links? — Omegatron 20:37, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

The Singapore National Library Board book sources search is using ELibraryHub.com. Could someone change the link to NLB's website [6]? I can't get the ISBN source link. It should be linked to NLB's not Elibraryhub. --Terence Ong Talk 04:02, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Restoring alphabetical order

Will users intuitively look for entries according to a mere list of anglophone countries by total population (not by anglophone population)? Moreover, organising it that way while alphabetically listing other countries in other regions (of which the anglophone countries are part of) doesn't make much sense. Lastly, the country list has no cited sources.

To that end, I've restored the prior logical alphabetical listing. E Pluribus Anthony 14:02, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi E. Pluribus Anthony,

Here's my concern:

Probability would seem to say that more users of the English Wikipedia come from countries that have large English-speaking population. We are going to get a lot more visitors to this page from Canada than we are from the Czech Republic.

So, let's make it easier for most visitors to this page to find the listings that are appropriate for them, and let's do this by putting them at the top of the page.

There were only nine countries that were on the list countries by English speaking population, and also had entries on this page, so I don't think that's unnavigable.

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • South Africa
  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Hong Kong
  • Singapore
  • New Zealand
  • Ireland

I agree with you it would be better to have a list of anglophone population, however I think using a list of countries with English as an official language is an acceptable proxy. While I think a citations would be useful, the above ranking of country size certainly passes my sanity test.

I think that it is okay to have two different kinds of organizations of country libraries, especially if we put a clear explanation for our reasoning.

User:Lunchboxhero

I totally disagree with this proposal/rationale:
  • the prior listing/order is erroneous and subjective, one that doesn't at all fulfill a principle of least astonishment and skins the cat unnecessarily; q.v. Anglosphere for how subjective these notions can be
  • the list is as yet incomplete and growing: what about countries like India and Pakistan, with arguably as many or more anglophones as the others, or the 40+ countries where English is official or a lingua franca? By what criteria should they be ordered? Obviate any ambiguity and organise them all in a consistent manner
  • even if a complete list for countries and related populations was complete or available (and I've given thought to updating one), many of the links connect to non-anglophone book sources/collections that possess non-anglophone works
  • why don't we sort the list by population within countries too? By city proper, metro area, anglophone population? Or how about by the size of each source/collection?
Arguably, alphabetisation may also be subjective but at least it's one a Wikipedian need only have knowledge of the English alphabet to comprehend.
One person's sanity is another's insanity. Until compelling reasons are forthcoming or a groundswell thinks otherwise, an alphabetical listing – as is the case currently – is the best option. E Pluribus Anthony 15:25, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi E. Pluribus Anthony,

Hello. I'll also respond in-text below:

Point by point:

First point: This is the disagreement we currently are having, not an supporing argument.

Second point: At present, there are no entries on this page for India or Pakistan. If such an entry was included, I would welcome it. Ideally, I would like to see the top ten countries, by visitation of the English Wikipedia, at the top of this page. As the traffic information for that is not readily available, I think that the scheme I have attempted gets part of the way there. It is not necessary and, I agree, a bad idea to order all countries by population of English speakers. The majority of traffic to the English Wikipedia comes from a handful of countries, and if we make it easier for visitors from those countries to find a relevant libraries, that would be an excellent thing.

  • I realise that these two countries are not yet included. However, an alphabetical listing will allow for the easy addition/consultation of countries no matter where they are (and arguably, what continent they belong to), instead of one where a determination has to be made about whether it should be in the English or non-English list. It's possible that anglophone Wikipedians in other countries, particularly non-native speakers or those who are multilingual, may use Wp and this resource (with concomitant traffic) ... and they might have some difficulty locating respective countries in an excessively parsed list.

Third point: Yes, however the aim of the the English-ordering scheme is not to make it easier to find anglophone works, but to help users of the English Wikipedia to get to links to libraries within their country, whether those collections be anglophone or not.

  • Actually, the aim of such a scheme is to increase the utility for this page and feature for users. This is currently a listing of book sources by country (actually by continent, then by country, et al.), not a listing of book sources by language of country. Thus, an arbitrary listing of English-speaking countries (in a list forever incomplete) is more complex than one based on a more fundamental understanding - that of the English alphabet and where you are or what country you're looking for (pt. 4). If the list must be sorted by language, anglophone countries should be sorted alphabetically, and then non-anglophone ones too: apples with apples, not oranges. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 23:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Fourth point: If we knew what the most popular links were within countries, it does not seem like a bad idea to make those links more prominent. However, I do not think it is necessary to do this, because the number of links within countries is presently manageable in the current configuration. In comparison, the Book sources page is acknowledge as over long and difficult to use. And, with an alphabetized scheme, some of the countries that an user of English Wikipedia is most likely from, at the bottom or near the bottom of the list: UK, Canada, and the US.

I do not think it is astonishing to find at the top of this page links to a handful of countries that people know have large Anglophone populations:

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • South Africa
  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Hong Kong
  • Singapore
  • New Zealand
  • Ireland

Obviously, it would be inappropriate to order all countries by this scheme, but it seems an improvement in usability to make the countries from which most of visitors originate more prominent. Alphabetization obviously also has a place, and perhaps these two ideas can co-exist without making the page too much longer. Either, we can the above list at the top of the page and have them be links to sections within the alphabetized scheme. Or we can have these sections be at the top of the page and put links back up to them in the alphabetized scheme.

User:Lunchboxhero

  • I disagree, but can be compelled otherwise. In summary, I feel the proposal places primacy on sorting by language that, while reasonable to some, is arguably not the best way to go and introduces assumptions that a visitor needn't or shouldn't have to make. Apply an equal standard and sort to all countries, and you preclude any ambiguity by doing so. Thanks! E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 23:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Dear E Plurbus Anthony,

I never thought my scheme appropriate for the ordering of all countries, but instead as a way to make the this page more useful to the bulk of the visitors of the English Wikipedia who come from a handful of countries. However, I take your point that that different orders for different countries may be confusing. With that in mind, what do you think of this draft rewrite, where the links in the sidebar point to the country sections which are alphabetized according to your layout.

User:Lunchboxhero

Hello! I've reordered the rewrite/sort alphabetically (consistent with rationale above) and tweaked it, but I see no reason to not include it. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 10:03, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I think we've improved the top of the page now. Good working this out with you.

User:Lunchboxhero

Agreed; it looks good. It's a pleasure doing business with you! :) E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 13:55, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
At second blush, I tweaked the quicklinks: I wikified Libraries (consistent with Booksellers, though I realise it's at the top of the article) and nixed the English-speaking territories wikilink (since, functionally, this differs from the other wikilinks in the box). Looks good; I trust this is sufficient. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 14:09, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Layout and stylistic improvements

What can we do to make this page more concise and usable? Two areas that could be improved simply:

  1. The Table of Contents could be rewritten to take up much less space without loss of important information.
    I think the TOC should remain as is (remember: users can hide it); instead, enhance the quicklink box and include only top-level notions and categories; otherwise, it would get unwieldy and redundant. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 14:18, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
  2. There is a section for Metasearches of many online booksellers which is followed by another section Searches across several online booksellers. Could these be combined?
    I think the current dichotomy is fine, but that's not to say those two sections can't be reorganised somehow. By what criteria? What will a user infer/intuit? Since the two sections are one atop the other, I think the current quicklink to the top is fine as is, however. E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 14:18, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
    Perhaps you are right, but what is the current dichotomy? If it is number of booksellers that you are searching across, than many of of the site are presently miscategorized. I would propose distinguishing between sites that aggregate the results from other online sites like Allbookstores.com and those that sites whose catalogs include merchants who do not have an independent web presence like Abebooks.
    The current dichotomy is that of the two sections you initially indicated. As I said, however, perhaps both can be reorganised differently/functionally – maybe by mere online portals of bookseller information (comparing prices), bona fide booksellers, publishers ... ? E Pluribus Anthony | talk | 19:52, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

User:Lunchboxhero

This page is now officially useless

Thanks to all who have inserted obscure search engines in the hope of increasing their own sales, or due to some misguided notion of completeness at the expense of usability; who have arbitrarily reordered the discussion, and removed comments that might help someone figure out which search engines are useful, especially those who have revised some items but not others. This page is now officially useless for anyone actually hoping to use the listings find a book.

Help us make it better. In the past few weeks we have been able to shorten the page considerably, and we have added a link that tells people how they can bypass the page altogether. Still, I agree that this page has gotten much too long. Perhaps if we agreed to put a limit the length of this page, that would help us figure out what is important and what is not. What do people think about 32K? User:Lunchboxhero

There are many more universities and public libraries on the list than there are random booksellers which people will get commissions from. The page seems to be oriented to helping people find the book more than marketing the book to people as if they are customers or something. Pointing people at public libraries or universities which they have ready access to seems like a noble thing for this page to do. Ansell 03:23, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the solution is to eliminate catalogs which may be useful for some users or to consider some catalogs better/more important than others. I think the solution is to put regional catalogs into subpages.--141.140.6.103 00:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Regional pages

I can definitely see where querying libraries/resources on the regional level would be very convenient... Why not split this page into large resources and medium resources, where large are national and medium are regional? i.e., for United States, have a list of the largest resources, then a link to a regional page which is indexed by state. It's always nice to know when a book is available locally.

Thoughts?

I agree. The main page should list the key links--big booksellers, worldcat, wikibooks, etc.--and the rest of it should be divided into regional pages. People could still set their prefs to go directly somewhere.--141.140.6.103 00:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

New York public library-research library

I was wondering why CATNYP of the NYPL Research library is not one of the search options on the Book sources page. or did i just miss it? was this brought up already? Shlomke 06:56, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess it was just missing. I put it in Shlomke 17:54, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

University of Liverpool (UK)

The search doesnt work ive tried numerous ISBNs taken from the catalogue and tried putting them back through wikipedia and it fails to find the books. I'm unsure of the code and have no idea how to fix it. Discordance 19:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. Lunchboxhero

Bookfinder.com URLs not working?

The Special:Booksources links to bookfinder.com don't appear to be working -- they just link to Bookfinder's front page for me. Can this be fixed? -- Rbellin|Talk 17:39, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. Lunchboxhero

Header too wide

It may just be my computer, but the in-page links on the white background stretch all the way across my browser, so that the links themselves are mixed in with the "Main Page" "Community Portal" etc. all the way on the left of the screen. I'd fix it, but I'm not quite sure how. Plantagenet Palliser 01:03, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green State University (in Ohio, U.S.) has a library with pop culture holdings which in many cases are unique among libraries. As such, I think it's helpful to have a link for searching.

Columbus Metropolitan Library

Can someone with better technical skills add The Columbus Metropolitan Library? They are rated #1 by Hennens American Public Library Rating Index! Their numeric search page is here. Thanks. --MrFizyx 18:35, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

This site uses POST, not GET, and therefore, I have no idea how to put the searchterm in automatically, [7] should be the format for searching for ISBN's on the site, however, it returns nothing. Sorry! Ansell 03:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, Ansell I appreciate your effort, and your effort on this page in general. At least now I don't feel so bad for not figuring it out myself. Thanks again. -MrFizyx 14:57, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I'll go ahead and fix it up :) Alex43223 Talk | Contribs | E-mail | C 02:41, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Dunedin Public Library

Same request as the above, this time for dunedin Public Library in New Zealand, the main library of one of the "big four" cities of NZ. The catalogue is here. Grutness...wha? 02:50, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Done Ansell 03:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm still only counting 3 of the "big four" cities. The capital city, Wellington, New Zealand, is still lacking. It's a very nice public library! The catalogue is: here Lewelma 20:40, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

DOI

This page would be so much easier to do if everyone integrated to use DOIs to link ISBN's. The system is there if people want to use it. Of course it would be a linkage back to the publisher for a printed book but the system is there. End dream here... Ansell 03:38, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

HELP

Can we have something like this for Bible references?

We have a template:

But that just links to Biblegateway.com and defaults to a particular version (currently the New International Version).

The problem with Biblegateway.com is that it contains only Conservative Protestant translations - the New Revised Standard Version, accepted by liberal Protestants, the Orthodox church, and the Roman Catholic church, is not there. Nor are the main Roman Catholic translations like the New Jerusalem Bible. Some of these non-Conservative Protestant versions are available legitimately online (I think the vatican website has an online copy of one of the Roman Catholic versions, for example).

And Protestant Bibles don't contain things like the Books of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, so you cant use the template to link to verses from them. This is quite biased against everyone who isn't a Conservative Protestant, so the only way really to be fair is to have something like this page.

Clinkophonist 22:39, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

bibleref has been deprecated, use Template:bibleverse. Jon513 16:45, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Many of the links, especially to libraries, result in expired session messages or other dead ends.

ISSN request (moved from ToDo)

  • It would be great if the knowledgeable folks who helped create this page could make an analogous one for ISSNs, perhaps titled Wikipedia:Periodical sources. I suppose very few online bookstores sell periodical subscriptions, but I'm sure many of the libraries in this book sources list will also allow searching on ISSNs. —Psychonaut 16:26, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Just a thought: I believe almost every search combines ISSN and ISBN, so this page should work with ISSN numbers as is.--141.140.6.103 00:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
      • I think there is a difference in at least some searches on the page, but it would be a good start to copy this page. Ansell 09:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
        • To clarify: ISSN searches don't actually work in most of the sources listed on this page with the code that is generated, as ISBN and ISSN records are handled differently in library catalog records (and many bookstore records) (they're in different fields). Since the script is sending an "ISBN" request, the catalog that you're searching goes out looking for an ISBN (rather than an ISSN), doesn't come up with any ISBNs that match, and gives you no results. phoebe 20:58, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Getting info on ISBNs and displaying it?

Is there some way of retrieving information on the ISBNs (probably from some external site) and then displaying it at the top of the page. It would be useful to have information such as title, author, publisher, type (Cloth, Mass Market, Trade Paperback), number of pages, edition, (un)ubridged, does it even exist?, etc. I, personally, don't know of a site that does this, though I wouldn't be surprised to find one that does. If anyone does know of one, which would, preferably, give the info in XML format (which, I would guess, would make it easier to parse), post it here and we can discuss it further.--StarkRG 20:53, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

It's a good idea, http://isbndb.com is one source, the problem is do they want Wikipedia drawing off their database. -- Stbalbach 21:14, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
If they don't it could also be possible to simply (or, not so simply) parse an Amazon page for the info. However I don't see why they would mind, as long as there's an explanation of where the information came from (and a thank-you note as well) --StarkRG 10:01, 25 May 2006 (UTC)


Namespace

"Now" that we got additional namespaces, shouldn't this page eventually be moved to MediaWiki or possibly template namespace? Can this be defined in MediaWiki:Booksources or does it need to be changed in the MediaWiki code? -- User:Docu

Alternate ISBNs

I just noticed this, which is still a bit unstable but looks worth keeping an eye on. Shimgray | talk | 09:38, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Linking via OCLC number

Now that OCLC has released worldcat.org (free access to WorldCat), could we make OCLC number linking an option? I don't know exactly how that would work, since this page assumes ISBNs. If we could make OCLCNUM into a magic number it's possible to link to WorldCat.org like this: http://www.worldcat.org/OCLCNUM

For example, for one of the books I'm currently reading: David B's graphic novel, Epileptic

OCLC numbers also work for linking to quite a few OPACs, I don't know about the antiquarian booksellers, though.

Thanks. RainbowCrane 20:29, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

If you're selling antiquarian books, you don't usually need to have much truck with ISBNs... Shimgray | talk | 21:49, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
correct, OCLC number is one option for a unique ID for books published pre-ISBN. RainbowCrane 01:42, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

See the new template {{OCLC}}. Enjoy. JesseW, the juggling janitor 03:36, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Santa Clara County, CA library to Special:Booksources

Copying my post from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals): Ok, I think this is the correct format:

Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 22:13, 18 August 2006 (UTC) 02:17, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Added to: United States, Public libraries: Santa Clara County public library catalog. GeoFan49 22:46, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

ISSNs

Reviving the ISSN search request from last year, as noted above:

  • There needs to be a separate page/form to search on ISSNs, as they are in different fields from ISBNs in most library catalog records. Wikipedia:Periodical sources as suggested above isn't a terrible title.
  • ISSNs are important: when trying to disambiguate a journal that's changed names a lot, or find something obscure, they can be incredibly useful
  • I'd suggest adding open worldcat, the big libraries listed on this page, and the ZDB database (as used on Template:ISSN). Listing bookstores is less useful for these publications, though not completely useless...

It shouldn't be too hard to reformat the URLs of library catalogs & whatnot from the booksources page to search for ISSNs rather than ISBNs. Is anyone interested in working on this? phoebe 21:19, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

ISSN's only link to journal title's not specific issues, volumes, or editions. What would be the benefit of ISSN links in the Wikipedia? Lunchboxhero 04:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

you would be able to find out what library actually subscribed to the journal you were looking for. You can't get an article without knowing who has the journal -- same as booksearches. -- phoebe (brassratgirl) /(talk) 21:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
SICI is for articles. See Bugzilla:10867 for a potential solution. — Omegatron 14:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

University of Cambridge

As a UK copyright library with most of the world's books in it, I think it would be useful to add the catalogue of the University Library at Cambridge to this page. I don't know how to do it, but if anyone with better programming skills than me wants to have a go, the web page of the university catalogue is this. Hope that's useful. 84.71.48.83 12:07, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

London Libraries

http://www.londonlibraries.org/ this website searches all of the London boroughs online library catalogue. Worth incorporating into the page? Jt spratt 11:11, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Questia Online Library

Questia Online Library is a subscription service that provides the full text of books for $100 a year, and allows for free viewing of title pages, indexes, searches, etc (albeit with constant pop-ups asking for a subscription). Hundreds of WP articles have bibliographies which link to it,[10] often with numerous links per article. (For example, see Tariff in American history#References. Rather than hard-linking the book titles to Questia it'd seem more fair to include it in this list and allow readers to choose either it or other libraries and booksellers. However they don't seem to have an ISBN search function. Any ideas? -Will Beback 04:30, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

This search doesn't work:

Putting the ISBN into the basic search on the homepage works fine - but I don't know how to edit the link. (The ISBN doesn't appear in the url, after a search.) --Singkong2005 · talk 04:32, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

  • "Find this book on the Österreichischer Bibliothekenverbund Gesamtkatalog National Austrian cumulative library catalogue" basically gives me a 404 error
  • "Find this book on Amazon.com" seems broken too

(131.130.121.106 11:15, 10 November 2006 (UTC))

Confirmed, the Amazon.com links are all broken. Sladen 20:57, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Fixed Amazon, but this page isn't protected, you know... Superm401 - Talk 03:52, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Sitesearches

The first two entries under Worldwide are sitesearches. That means it will open Google or Yahoo, but search their index only for a particular site (Worldcat here). Please don't change it to say only Google. Superm401 - Talk 03:36, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


Too many links for one page

...Am I right? Perhaps {{Hidden}} can be applied here if the script doesn't apply to subpages. —Down10 TACO 23:14, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

The whole page will still load. If the length bothers you, bypass the page, as suggested. Superm401 - Talk 00:23, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I added justbooks.co.nz. I have no connection to them, other then buying 2 books from them recently. (I choose them after looking at most NZ online book sellers I could find and finding them the cheapest, at least for the books I was looking at. They did sell below the RRP and quite a few don't, some are even higher. They also had the best international shipping costs as I was sending these books overseas).

Anyway, before I added it, I had a brief look through this page. One issue that concerns me is that there doesn't appear to be any guideline as to how to decide whether to add a site. This issue comes up in other areas of wikipedia of course, especially external links and lists/comparisons of e.g. software. Sometimes I've seen people suggest we only allow mention of (in this case it would be book sellers) who have a wikipedia article. Or we could just leave it as is and hope this doesn't get too spammy and/or too unwiedly just to people adding their favourite sites. And if it does, just wait until people raise objections. Nil Einne 11:33, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Back on December 23, 2006 Bookser added the custom form. It DOES NOT do anything that a regular google site-specific search doesn't do, other than show an Amazon link and Adsense Ads. The revenue from these go to him, not to Wikipedia, not to WorldCat. —RP88 20:33, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

JohnSay, I reverted back to the spammy form while we discuss this issue. Please tell me why you think Wikipedia should be using it, otherwise I'll remove it. —RP88 20:37, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

That form sends the revenue to an Amazon partner by the name of "chuvashiaportal". I can't find any evidence that this is the worldcat project. In addition, the user who added it (Bookser) doesn't appear to have any connection to the worldcat project. —RP88 20:55, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've checked. The Amazon partner "chuvashiaportal" is on the Spam blacklist. It's definitely not an official worldcat portal. —RP88 21:34, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

world-cat.org is not worldcat.org

Please note that world-cat.org is not worldcat.org (take a look at whois). Looking at the site source it is apparent it is "chuvashiaportal", which is on the blacklist. Although now, in addition to using "chuvashiaportal", they're also using an Amazon partner by the name of "public-library-20". —RP88 13:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Lokitoki, please stop inserting world-cat.org and identifying them as WorldCat. They are not. If you visit the page in question, it clearly does not do a public library search. It does an amazon associate search for "chuvashiaportal", who are on the spam blacklist.If this is important to you, please respond. —RP88 15:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Franklin County, Ohio

The library linked to on the page is the Columbus Metropolitan Library and while it does share resources with several libraries in the county, it does not share with all libraries in Franklin County (i.e. Grandview) and maybe should be changed to the Columbus Metropolitan Library on the main page. If there is a reason why it is called the Franklin County public library page, please let me know. SailorAlphaCentauri 20:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I see that this was addressed, in a way, in the earlier Columbus Metropolitan Library post, but it is not correctly named on the list in it's current format. SailorAlphaCentauri 20:31, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Actually, the search page it's linked to links the major libraries in Columbus together (Discovery Place Libraries is Worthington, Southwest, and Columbus Metro). Nevertheless, it should be title as Columbus Metropolitan, so I'm gonna change it. Alex43223 Talk | Contribs | E-mail | C 02:44, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Please add Prospector

I would like to add the Prospector catalog, a unified catalog of many libraries in Colorado and Wyoming, including the public and university catalogs on the page already. The link might look like this Prospector I could not find a way now to add to the script myself. Some special access seems to be needed for that. Jmath666 21:15, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, I found the page to edit and added Prospector both the public and academic libraries. Jmath666 21:36, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Cleaned out a lot of the nonsense

Per Wikipedia:External links and Wikipedia is NOT a freaking web directory I cleaned out a bunch of price comparison services and bookstores that did not have Wikipedia articles of their own. In order to be a useful resource this can't just be a dumping ground for every commercial website in existence. DreamGuy 06:17, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Why all the foreign language links?

In case people haven't noticed, the is English Wikipedia.What possible reason is there for this to link to sooooo many sites in other countries, and especially the ones that aren't even in English? I think this needs to be pared down? 216.165.158.7 03:11, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

To get information on non-English books, for example? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ruud Koot (talk • contribs) 22:57, 27 March 2007 (UTC).
You don't need several hundred links to foreign language sites on this page to "get information on non-English books" -- and how many non-English books are even on English Wikipedia? There must be some link most likely to get information on most things, there would seem to be no purpose for the huge long list of every podunk library in the world. DreamGuy 19:34, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree. The page is just too large to be usable. Joflaitheamhain 11:00, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
I think you miss the whole point. This version of Wikipedia is here to serve those who can understand English, a very large group of people, spread all over the world. Access to local libraries, for example, may be the best way for someone to be able to read the information in a reference in an article. Also, note that information for this version of Wikipedia comes from many, many different sources, including information written in a huge array of non-English-language publications with ISBN numbers. I applaud the efforts of this article's authors to include as much information as possible for publications in all languages and sources in all places. Tim Ross·talk 11:38, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
Remember, country is not language. I find a lot of English language books in libraries here in Sweden, for example. The page is not too big to use either. You just click on your country and disregard the rest. —Bromskloss (talk) 13:24, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Trellis (University of Waterloo, Guelph, Laurer) seems to have an embedded session ID that was only valid for ten minutes. Not sure if there's a way to get the right page w/o such an ID.

Added Iceland

Iceland has a unified book (and magazine, CDs etc) catalog called Gegnir. I have added it to this list, the search uses the MAGICNUMBER, however it returns closest matches if it doesn't find the item in question so results might look odd for non-existing titles. --Stalfur 13:27, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Museophile

Museophile does not support ISBN13, and should possibly be removed from the list? Jerazol 07:30, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Added a reuse rights lookup on Copyright Clearance Center to the Online Databases section. Skottk 20:49, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Since the page has grown quite a lot, how about putting some of the content inside collapsible boxes like this?


Europe

Austria
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina


This won't help with page load time, but will make navigation much easier. --DStoykov 22:54, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

IMO it's high time for either this or some kind of sub-page solution (cf. the old to-do box at the top of this page) heqs ·:. 11:32, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Book sources question

How do i go about adding an online bookshop to Book Sources? And secondly, how does one add specialised bookstores that may specialise in a particular subject area? Joflaitheamhain 13:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

ISBN-10 and ISBN-13

hi, are there going to be automatic links made for isbn 13s? b/c since that's moving to the standard isbn length. thank you. Shirley Ku 23:18, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Please see the discussion here.--Timeshifter (talk) 02:10, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

initial ISBN search does nothing

From the external links section of The New Deal and corporatism there is this source for further reading:

  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch (2007). Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. New York: Picador Usa. ISBN 9780312427436.

Clicking the link in that source info takes one to

Once there clicking the "Go" button does not seem to take one anywhere. One ends up on the exact same page. Without any changes as far as I can see. I am using the latest Firefox browser. --Timeshifter 14:46, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

same thing in Safari. DGG (talk) 22:07, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
I clarified the introduction. The purpose of this page was not intuitive. Please see Wikipedia:ISBN. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:26, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I find that India related links got removed. I'd like to know the reason. If spam is the reason (there was no spam except 2 or so; 'coz I only have added many links), what about the sites linked here now? --Rrjanbiah 11:55, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Canonical search URLs

Many of the URLs are uglier than necessary, e.g.:
http://www.bogusbooks.com/search?isbn=1234567890&option1=&option2=&listsideways=no&session=0123456789ABCDEF

I've never seen a clean repository of search URLs for books. Maybe this page should be one. I know that getting the information is like pulling teeth. I have never found a definitive definition of search URLs for WorldCat or Amazon.

Currently the Amazon link is: http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-isbn=MAGICNUMBER
What's the difference between this and: http://www.amazon.com/dp/MAGICNUMBER

Temblast (talk) 21:36, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Note that being "a clean repository" of links is not the purpose of the page. Cleaner is better, but only when both links are equally functional. For instance, the below Amazon link does not support ISBN-13, so only the upper is acceptable. Superm401 - Talk 09:35, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Toronto Public Library

Not sure if this is the right place for this, but when looking up a book, I noticed that the URL scheme for the catalog at the Toronto Public Library (Canada) appears to have changed, which breaks the lookup. Does the maintainer of the book source tool monitor this page, or do I need to post to a special page? Thanks, MCB (talk) 06:52, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I was poking around their site for the new URL format and can't even find an ISBN search there anymore! LukeyBoy (talk) 23:35, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
ISBN search still exists: enter the ISBN into a 'keyword' search. http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/hel_cat_sch.jsp#isbns . bunnyhero (talk) 15:34, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Instead of listing every single library in Canada why not just list AMICUS? This is the free federal governement catalog that searchs over 30 million records from 1,300 Canadian libraries including Library and Archives Canada. One click and you have a list of the libraries that carry that book. What could be simpler? http://amicus.collectionscanada.gc.ca/aaweb-bin/aamain/advanced_search?l=0&username=NLCGUEST&documentName=anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.197.178.2 (talk) 23:12, 17 October 2008 (UTC)


ISBN "numbers"

Would it be possible to remove all references to ISBN numbers [sic] on the Book Sources page? Numbers is already part of the ISBN acronym. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.66.216.108 (talk) 13:54, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Book Sources page not as clear as should be

Hi, I've made a comment on the Talk:ISBN page but which is relevant here. Please make any comments there. I see the same point was made on this page last November Wikipedia_talk:Book_sources#initial_ISBN_search_does_nothing, but it still doesn't seem intuitive. PamD (talk) 08:51, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Social book-cataloging sites

I noticed that LibraryThing has had a link on the page for a while, apparently without objection, so I figure I will add links for Goodreads and Shelfari as well.--Larrybob (talk) 17:15, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

OpenLibrary

Would someone please add a link to the Internet Archive-supported Open Library project under "Online Databases"? The link will be in the form of http://openlibrary.org/search?wisbn=MAGIC_NUMBER - thanks. -137.222.114.243 (talk) 17:54, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

National Library of the Argentine Republic

Hi Everyone. I have added National Library of the Argentine Republic to the search but I have noticed it only produces successful searches if the isbn is with the dashes, for example "9871220197" gives no result but 987-1220-19-7 gives the correct result. MAGICNUMBER doesnt have the option to put dashes, any idea how to sort this out?

Thanks

bcartolo (talk) 22:59, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Preserve or generate a hyphenated ISBN

Is there a chance to modify Wikimedia so that it generates the hyphenated ISBN parameter under a special name such as HYPHENATED_ISBN?

Some online bookstores require hyphens in the ISBN search clause. I'd like to be able to write ISBN 5-7380-0015-3 (or at least {{ISBN|5-7380-0015-3}}), select Ozon.ru and arrive at 

 http://www.ozon.ru/?context=search&text=5-7380-0015-3

I'd like to be able to use a hyphenated ISBN parameter for this purpose, such as 

 http://www.ozon.ru/?context=search&text=HYPHENATED_ISBN

Also, I am not sure why Mediawiki's parsing of the regular article text ISBN ... throws hyphens away on converting the text to [[Special:Book sources/PARSEDNUMBER]]. This seems to be redundant because further substitution of MAGICNUMBER on the Book sources page throws hyphens away regardless of the format of the parameter to that page.

Finally, it would be nice if Mediawiki could automatically hyphenate non-hyphenated ISBN numbers provided in the regular article text, ISBN ... when generating its HYPHENATED_ISBN substitution in the Book sources page.

--ilgiz (talk) 15:38, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you, my previous section is about the same. The Argentine's National Library can only search hyphenated ISBNs bcartolo (talk) 02:29, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
I have added a feature request at bugzilla ([11]) bcartolo (talk) 02:53, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Vote in bugzilla

Hi

I have created two reports in bugzilla and It would be nice if many people vote for them so the developers notice and make them. The links are:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18814 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18813

Both reports are based on suggestion from this discussion bcartolo (talk) 14:55, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Price Comparison Site For Possible Addition

wiki user earonsky would like an editor to take a look at his site for possible inclusion to the price comparison section on the Book sources page. His URL is www.wecomparebooks.com

I guess it is User:Earonsky123 who earlier edited as User:Wecomparebooks but stopped on my request. He mailed me 20 July but has not reacted to my email reply. If it's added then I think the code should be:
PrimeHunter (talk) 23:08, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Google book search link points to dead Amazon page

Even thought the entry "Find this book at Google Book Search online database" has source code referencing Google books (* [ http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=MAGICNUMBER Find this book ] at [ [ Google Book Search ] ] online database), clicking the link takes you to an Amazon error page.


Christopher L. Jorgensen (talk) 19:41, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

It works for me. For example http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=9781413304541 correctly finds "The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-free Writings, Music, Art & More". PrimeHunter (talk) 12:07, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Currently, the Google Book Search link points to AddAll. --dwchin (talk) 09:10, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, scratch that -- something's hijacking my browser links to Google Book Search. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwchin (talk • contribs) 09:15, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Special:booksources

1. If one goes directly to that page, searching in the search box would normally be expected to actually search for the book, not just link to WP:Book sources and place the isbn there to be searched.
2. If WP:Book sources is accessed directly, there should be a searchbox directly on it, not a link to Special:booksources in which to enter the number which then returns you to this page with the isbn inserted,
3. In any case, a search through Special:Book sources would normally be expected to include only those sources which actually have the book; I realise this is presently impractical, but there needs to be an explanation that this is not being done. DGG ( talk ) 21:11, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Should Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog be listed first?

I note that KVK was added to the top of this list in August without as much as an edit summary, let alone discussion, by an unregistered editor whose IP address is registered to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. When I search through this catalogue I find that the first source presented is abebooks.de, a commercial bookseller. Should we really have a situation where a reader selecting the first of the options presented here is led to a commercial site rather than a library catalogue? Usually I would revert immediately per WP:BRD but the fact that this has been allowed to stand for so long hints that there may be a tacit consensus for this. Can anyone justify having this site listed first rather than Worldcat? Phil Bridger (talk) 18:00, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Since nobody has defended this listing I have moved KVK from the top position. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:04, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

sorry, I didn't see this, but I support it being first, if set properly. This source lists information from a number of catalogs in alphabetic order, using the settings at [hthttp://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk/kvk/kvk_en.html]. Before it searches, you have to select what catalogs to search. Initially, none is selected. It does not search commercial catalogs unless that is enabled. Unfortunately, someone entered the link so it does look in the catalogs also. I agree with you that this is inappropriate as a primary suggested search, just as much so as using this page to search amazon by default. I have added a modified link that no longer does that & put it into a different section, & will watch for further changes. What's your opinion of that? I can easily tinker with it further. The reason I didn't see it is because I have it set up to look for my own customized settings for the libraries I think likely, so it doesn;t time out while searching those less important. DGG ( talk ) 22:49, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Bloat

The idea of this page is to provide readers with links to useful resources for finding books. Why, then, is it set up so that in any normal-sized browser window we have to scroll down to get to any links. I would suggest removing the map, which doesn't add any functionality unavaliable in the table of contents, and reducing the verbiage at the top of the page to a concise description of what the page is here for. Any other notes can be moved to the bottom. By doing this we can make the most useful links available without scrolling. I note from my previous comment that this talk page doesn't seem to get much traffic, so, if I get no replies in the next few days, I'll make a bold edit. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:21, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Phil, try that, but maybe the map is needed, perhaps in reduced size, because the table of contents by itself needs to be scrolled to get beyond Europe. I'm not sure how to do t of C's in 2 columns. It's on my watchlist, but I'm way behind. DGG ( talk ) 23:25, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
I use an alternate approach: my monobook.js tests for URLs ending in "Special:BookSources/<isbn>" and takes me to a particular heading in such pages. (I usually want to go to Amazon.com, but occasionally want another book source, so this suits me better than user:Lunchboxhero's solution.) Cheers, CWC 14:32, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
That's fine for tech-savvy registered users, but I'm thinking more of what we present to our general readers, the vast majority of whom are unregistered. As far as possible I try to use the default settings for my account because, as an editor, I want to see Wikipedia as our readers see it - in fact the only change I have made is a bit of CSS to provide a bit more contrast between read and unread links, because my eyesight isn't as good as it was in my younger days. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Yes, you're right about unregistered users. Hmm. Maybe we should two TOCs, a Quick Table of Contents with only section headings, then the standard Full TOC, like this. Just an idea. CWC 10:29, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Two ToCs for easier navigation

Some longish technical documents (eg., this one) provide two Tables of Contents: a brief ToC listing only top top-level sections, then a full ToC with subsections, subsubsections, etc. In my experience, this makes it much easier to find things.

I suggest we add a "Concise Table of Contents", like this. I'm seriously considering making this edit. Please take a look at that example and encourage, discourage, advise and/or trout-slap me. Cheers, CWC 12:55, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

No-one objected, so I made the change. (Has anyone even noticed?)
The only drawback is that any future changes to section headings have to be reflected in the Brief ToC. Cheers, CWC 13:27, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
I noticed :D, I think in the end though, we simply have to come up with another idea. Perhaps something like with the geohack page for coordinates on the toolserver. I don't know, but this list is unmanageably large. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:04, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Map vs heading

The {{world image map}} template connects Australia, NZ and the South Pacific to the URL "#Australasia", but the subsection 5.5 is now named "Australasia and Oceania". As a crude fix, I've added "<span id="Australasia">" and "</span>" around the word Australasia in that heading. I've suggested changing the template (see Template talk:World image map#Australasia and Oceania), which would allow us to remove my ugly HTML markup. Cheers, CWC 10:45, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Special libraries and Research libraries

We currently have two subnsections named "Special libraries (research libraries)". (See research library and special library for definitions of these terms.) These two sections mention just two libraries (one each), both of which are research libraries:

  1. The Pritzker Military Library is listed in section 5.3.2.2.4.
  2. The library of the New Zealand Institute for Crop and Food Research, listed in Section 5.5.2.3

Now it happens that section 5.3.2.2.4 is the longest line in the big table of contents, and making it shorter would make that ToC narrower.

Would anyone object to changing both headings to "Research libraries"? CWC 12:45, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan

Is there any reason why the library catalogue of the Japanese national library isn't mentioned here? (212.247.11.156 (talk) 12:48, 13 December 2009 (UTC))

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