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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)
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)
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
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 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)
OCLC Guide to Deeplinking explains how to construct urls for records in most library catalog software.
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 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)
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'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)
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)
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.
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
This is wrong: links without MAGICNUMBER should be fixed (if possible) and not simply removed. 17:18, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
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.
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
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)
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)
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.
—Psychonaut 17:55, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
If I go to http://en.wikipedia.org/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:
--Graue 03:35, 7 January 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I think we've improved the top of the page now. Good working this out with you.
What can we do to make this page more concise and usable? Two areas that could be improved simply:
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
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 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)
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
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
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 (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.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Many of the links, especially to libraries, result in expired session messages or other dead ends.
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)
"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
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)
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)
See the new template ((OCLC)). Enjoy. JesseW, the juggling janitor 03:36, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
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)
Reviving the ISSN search request from last year, as noted above:
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)
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)
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 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)
(131.130.121.106 11:15, 10 November 2006 (UTC))
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)
...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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
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.
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 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?
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)
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)
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)
From the external links section of The New Deal and corporatism there is this source for further reading:
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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:
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)
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))