In article <20060222211701.GP19232 at lug-owl.de>,
Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw at lug-owl.de> writes:
On Wed, 2006-02-22 10:49:04 -0700, Richard
<legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of a web site with a full ISBN
catalog of books where
you can build a "my books" collection?
What is the goal you're seeking for? Why is a ISBN catalog needed?
ISBN numbers change when editions or bindings (paperback, hardback)
change. I've started scanning through ebay looking for older books
about computer graphics. Being a relatively new topic, its a
'collecting goal' that is within one's grasp until the point of
around... TRON. :-) After that the number of publications starts
growing exponentially.
However, what I find really interesting about older graphics books is
that they have pictures of period gear. Pictures that aren't on the
net anywhere as the items all predate the "endless September" of the
modern internet. I finally found a picture of an Evans & Sutherland
Picture System 300, for instance.
So, the 1973 edition of Newmann & Sproul's classic text has different
photos and content from the 1978 2nd edition. All the ebay book
listings give the ISBN, which lets you easily correlate information
with Amazon (just enter the ISBN in the search box and it takes you
right to the page). A simple flat text list of an initial book list
is at <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/vintage/books.html>.
However, its painfully obvious that this manual approach doesn't scale
beyond a handfull of books. I'd like someone *else* to maintain the
database of my collection, letting me just click on books I own to
mark them as such and share the list of books with others. Again, all
this is available on the "my movies" feature of <http://www.imdb.com>;
if something like that was available for books, it would be perfect.
ReaderWare looks interesting, but its $40 which is more than I'm
willing to spend, since I'm not a "book collector", I'm a
"computer
graphics" collector, of which books are a part. Book collector
software is probably overkill for what I'm after. I guess I could
write a simple web scraper that would get the title, author and year
information from amazon from the ISBN, but I'd rather not write
anything either.
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