Unnatural Keys – Nature doesn’t come with identifiers

Re:Unnatural Keys – Nature doesn’t come with identifiers by eshnil on Sunday May 28, 2023 @03:07AM (#36101818)

I ran into the same problem while building https://learnawesome.org/ . Forget the broad class of "learning resources", even the "books" category doesn't have a usable unique ID. Not everything gets an ISBN for example. There's also the ambiguity between a "work" and an "edition" of a work.

This is probably why OpenLibrary supports mapping of books with 40+ identifiers: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/master/o...

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Re:Unnatural Keys – Nature doesn’t come with identifiers by makeitdouble on Sunday May 28, 2023 @03:39AM (#36101975)

ISBN is an interesting case as the publisher has leeway on how it's handled accross the lifetime of a book. In particular some books will get multiple ISBN for the same version, and some other books can keep the same ISBN through multiple minor revisions.

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