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I think there are, the author says so, but according to author they don’t make clear if a book is a new edition, translation, etc of a previously published book. So getting a list of published works wherein “A Book Title” is a single result and “A Book Title 2nd edition”, “A Book Title 3rd edition”, etc are not listed in addition to “A Book Title”, doesn’t exist. I would think it’s possible to write a layer of logic that takes a list of published books and removes extra editions, translations, etc to get what the author wants but perhaps the problem is more difficult than I realize



we built this "work-level" catalog at Margins [1] -- 12mo+ of work -- book data is the messiest data I've worked with in my 10+ years of building things with data

[1] iOS app to track and discover books: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718


I spent a couple of years working on this as a hobby and, yeah, book metadata is difficult to explain just how irregular it actually is. It might actually be worse than people names.

That being said, the reason I was working on this was because I wanted a simple and effective way to get alerted to new books published by authors I want to track, can this work for that?


As a feature within our app, probably Q2/Q3 this year; we want to finish backfilling historical books before turning actual notifications on

As an API for you to query yourself for free, not for a while (but on the long-term roadmap!)


When is a book the same as another?




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