Where's the IMDb for Books?

Mac Slocum
October 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Over on the TOC Community, David Henley expands on recent discussions around publisher and author brand building by drawing an interesting connection to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb):

Not everyone chooses a film because of who directs it or who the screenwriter was, but some of us do, and now with databases like IMDB we can easily find lists of films containing the actors we like, or directors and discover more things we might like to watch.

I think books can be the same. Currently I don't get to know who edits each book, or acquires the rights, but if I did I might start to follow their work. Authors need not be the only brands. Publishers can establish a brand identity the way imprints used to. Most will have to start over as they've diluted any meaning they ever had.

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3 Comments

Carolyn Jewel said:
October 27, 2008 10:16 AM

Library Thing, Shelfari or Good Reads? Any one of these are contenders. Good idea, too.

Andrew said:
October 27, 2008 10:57 AM

Library Thing has a Common Knowledge database per work with fields such as the book's editor at the publisher, blurbers, agent, awards, series, etc with 693,000+ entries thus far, almost all from users. They make the data available freely for non-commercial use (and by permission for the latter).

If someone could tap into publishers' Onix feeds (which I know Library Thing has been investigating), they could merge all this data together and create something akin to the IMDB of books. That site has a lot of other great data re the relationships between books, which fuels their recommendation engine, and their users have done a ton of cleanup work (i.e. combining the cloth, paper, mass market, translated editions of the same book as one work) that would benefit a book IMDB site.

hugh mcguire said:
October 27, 2008 2:05 PM

it's right here!:
http://openlibrary.org/

wikistyle, update as you like.

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