Shafranovich, FRBRizing Amazon’s Content
Yakov Shafranovich’s Monday blog post FRBRizing Amazon’s Content is very interesting.
About two weeks ago I accidentally stumbled on a third public service that does something similar. When Amazon launched their Kindle eBook reader they made lots of titles available as a Kindle eBook. HOWEVER, they did not want to change the ISBN numbers for these titles. So what they did is re-organize their catalog is a way that all editions of the same work now appear to be linked to together including audio, eBook, hard cover, etc. This ability is buried in their API right here and is called RelatedItems:
He’s put up bookchaser.com, a tool to compare the results from Amazon, thingISBN, and xISBN.. Compare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (starting with the ISBN of a Canadian manifestation): 81 results at xISBN, 105 at thingISBN, and 23 at Amazon, or, as Shafranovich calls his application, amazingISBN. On the other hand, here’s a book where Amazon knows more than the other two services.
I’m curious how often people run into false positives in any of these services.
Of course, what a false positive is isn’t exactly clear. If it’s another work entirely, it’s obviously a false positive. But _should_ a translation into antoher language be included in the set? Should a dramatization of a novel be in the same set with the novel? Different services may make different decisions about whether they ought to be (which they don’t neccesarily tell us, in the case of 1 or 2 of these 3), and also have different error rates in carrying out what they decide ought to be. This makes it hard for me as a software developer to know what to do with these—a paperback vs hardcover, I definitely want to present to the user as an interchangeable item. A different edition? Maybe, maybe not. An audio book reading of a novel? Not interchangeable, but should definitely be brought to their attention. A translation or dramatization? Even further afield. Just having this big set of “related” things, and not knowing the nature of the relationship, it’s hard for me to figure out what to DO with it in my software.
Comment by Jonathan Rochkind — 26 March 2008 @ 5:06 pm