K_k_sze·Dec 22, 2020
OK. I just did: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4322
In Introducing the Open Library Explorerinternetarchive
openlibrary
Python2019–2026
internetarchive / openlibrary
openlibrary
One webpage for every book ever published!
12Distinct people
45Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
6.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
One webpage for every book ever published!
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I love Open Library (and the internet archive project in general)—I've read so many good books through them! I really hope they don't get shut down. They're also truly open…
aleksandrh used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year45 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-11-06 22:21:37 UTC to 2026-04-09 20:29:31 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 0 | 21 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
21 sourcesIf you're able to describe how it's wrong, an issue on https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new would be appreciated! Thank you!
In Introducing the Open Library ExplorerYeah, good comment, good link. I also like their github though: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
In Introducing the Open Library ExplorerThis is the #1 feedback so far (and good feedback) that having a way to jump directly to a number would be appreciated. Will see what we can do!
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4320
In Introducing the Open Library ExplorerThis is a great idea. One of the reasons Open Library Explorer is possible is we have a healthy amount of Dewey + Library of Congress classification data for our books. As you notes, Dewey has Literature 8xx. Library Explorer also supports Library of Congress (you can go to the settings cog and change the classification system).
Some classifications (LCCN) are better at encodind Author data and we also have a significant amount of author data in Open Library (we'd just need to integrate it more meaningfully in our search index).
I opened an issue for you here:
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4319
Given our small team size, not sure we'll have the bandwidth to prioritize any time soon, but contributions are also welcome from the community and we (the community) meet every Tuesday @ 11:30am to discuss and unblock toget
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her.
Hi markdown, there is a radiobutton on the /search page for only showing `ebooks`.
Do you mean this option doesn't work through the search.json API? If so, can you please make sure we have an issue open https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...?
You should be able to add has_fulltext:true to your query (which at least returns a set of books for which there is some full-text in existence:
e.g.
http://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=has_fulltext:true%20AND...
In Show HN: Instantly search 28M books from OpenLibraryI just created https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4275 - thanks!!
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keyshttps://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4266 tracking this issue here
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keysThis is right.
Books pre ~1973 don't have ISBN. And goodreads covers far more material than just modern material.
The current Goodreads importer makes a big/unfortunate tradeoff of trying to have something which works for the majority of material on people's goodreads lists.
It doesn't preclude further efforts -- Open Library knows about millions of books that don't have ISBN. So if anyone wants to help us improve our importer (or at least register their interest by creating an issue which calls out what other identifiers should be considered -- e.g. LOC, etc) that would be very helpful.
# To open an issue:
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
# Here's the code for the importer
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/892adebb...
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keysEven opening an issue for this would be a massive help:
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
The importer is a new project (as of August this year) and I think there's a lot of opportunity for improving it (including importing missing records on demand).
Other hat tips: I also want to call out the great work of https://inventaire.io, another great project in the space which uses wikidata, as they also have a goodreads import which we're learning from. Another project I'm excited about (which has goodreads import) is beta.thestorygraph.com. Not sure the status of its source code but I heard an interview from the founder and she and her work so far seems great.
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keysbbkane, this is a great idea (identifying which books didn't import). If you'd be so kind as to help, please open a feature request for this!
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
If you tag @tabshaikh who helped implement the importer and me @mekarpeles we can make sure it gets triaged and tagged correctly this week :)
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keysHowdy rikroots! Thanks for this kind message, we're really excited about designing a way to help authors claim their pages. It's not a feature our current author pages have yet.
As a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, having a trusted catalog is pretty paramount to what we're trying to accomplish and Aaron Swartz's original dream for an Open Library.
I've created an issue for this feature (as it's something we've discussed doing for a while). I'll also be adding this to our upcoming Tuesday 2021 roadmap discussion.
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4263
Thanks for raising this
In Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keysFor anyone who wishes Open Library was even better, please join one of our weekly community calls @ 11:30am Pacific.
For an invite, please send me an email at mek@archive.org or go to:
https://openlibrary.org/volunteer
# APIs & Data Dumps
- https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
- https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books
- https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps monthly data dumps for if you need bulk access and the APIs are not enough.
# Spread the word
Also, if you want to help raise awareness of this resource, please help us get the word out on twitter!
1. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338185940469051392
2. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338186553915367425
# Issues
Thank you all for helping us discover some issues with our goodreads importer and search (recently migrated to Python3 + thanks @cdrini et al for these
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fast bug fixes! If you notice an problem, please help open an issue here:
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
# Learn More
- https://archive.org/details/openlibrary-tour-2020/openlibrar... if you want to learn more about Open Library, here's a short intro vid.
- https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary if you want to follow on github.
Hi! I work on Open Library. The project is entirely open source, with an active community, so anyone can contribute fixes/features on GitHub: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
And yeah, searching needs some work! That's on my task list for this month. Just this Friday I spent most of my day working on updating our search engine, Solr, from 3.6 to 8.7 (wip!). But search is a _BIG_ pain point. We're a small team with a big long list of things to do, but we are making progress! This year we updated to Python 3, switched most of our production environments to docker-based for easier deploys and to give open source contributors more control of production infra, added reading history stats for users, added a new interface for exploring books, worked on a novel recommendation system, added text selection to the online BookReader for
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public domain books, added GoodReads importing, grew our community, added the ability to search by classification, and much, much more (you can see highlights from our year here: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3891 ).
There is still _definitely_ a lot to do, but I think the biggest reason worth using/contributing to Open Library is likely its open source community. Anyone can jump in and help make improvements to the system (as they very often do!). Personally, I think it's more likely that a system with a community will survive/flourish than one maintained by a single person (I also wondered whether I should just create my own before contributing to and now working on Open Library!). And there are also loads of different tasks associated with a site like OL, which would be impossible for me to do if I was going it alone.
If you would be interested, checkout the GitHub repo: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary . It's very active, and you can get an idea of how we work :)
Hi! I work on Open Library; sorry about that! We had a Python 3 migration that stirred the pot a little. We deployed a fix, so it should be working now!
https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/4259
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