Re:Show HN: Instantly search 28M books from OpenLibrary
by mekarpeles on Monday December 14, 2020 @12:18PM
(#25420142)
Jabo,
I love to see this, more access for the book community -- especially how quickly it came together. Nice work Jabo and excited to see Typesense in action.
Open Library gladly & thankfully tweeted its support of your hard work:
By adding .json to our search endpoint, you can use Open Library's json search endpoint (which also contains bookcover links). You can also use this to fetch books by ISBN:
We need to improve our cover service, it's definitely been neglected, but the cover IDs from our data dump, solr search index, and book APIs can be plugged in to our cover store to point to or fetch book covers. We don't yet have a current data bulk dump of covers available (it's on the roadmap) but if you need "all" the covers, please email us [email protected] instead of hitting covers 1-by-1. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/covers
4. The new (unannounced) Open Library Explorer
I'm honestly kind of hoping no one reads this far into the comments because we haven't announced this one yet and I'm sure there are major performance issues (it's beta), but cdrini recently added dewey + library of congress classifications to our search index... Making this masterpiece possible:
I love to see this, more access for the book community -- especially how quickly it came together. Nice work Jabo and excited to see Typesense in action.
Open Library gladly & thankfully tweeted its support of your hard work:
https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338531822536310789
In every intention of being additive to Jabo's work, thought I'd share a few resources folks may not be aware of:
1. Open Library's Full-text Search
Major hat tip to the Internet Archive's Giovanni Damiola for this one: Folks may also appreciate the ability to full-text search across 4M of the Internet Archive's books on Open Library: https://blog.openlibrary.org/2018/07/14/search-full-text-wit.... You can try it directly here: http://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=thanks%20for%20all%20...
As per usual, nearly all Open Library urls are themselves APIs, e.g.: http://openlibrary.org/search/inside.json?q=thanks%20for%20a...
2. Open Library's search API
By adding .json to our search endpoint, you can use Open Library's json search endpoint (which also contains bookcover links). You can also use this to fetch books by ISBN:
http://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=isbn:9781400067824
3. Book Cover Service (has issues)
We need to improve our cover service, it's definitely been neglected, but the cover IDs from our data dump, solr search index, and book APIs can be plugged in to our cover store to point to or fetch book covers. We don't yet have a current data bulk dump of covers available (it's on the roadmap) but if you need "all" the covers, please email us [email protected] instead of hitting covers 1-by-1. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/covers
4. The new (unannounced) Open Library Explorer
I'm honestly kind of hoping no one reads this far into the comments because we haven't announced this one yet and I'm sure there are major performance issues (it's beta), but cdrini recently added dewey + library of congress classifications to our search index... Making this masterpiece possible:
https://openlibrary.org/explore
The ability to browse Open Library digitally, with all the glory of a physical library.