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A comment on Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive? by WillAdams on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @06:55AM (#44179349)
The thing is, for an ISBN, that is one edition, by one publisher.

I count 80+ editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Hobbit_ at:

https://tolkienlibrary.com/booksbytolkien/hobbit/editions.ph...

granted some predate ISBNs, one is the 3D pop-up version, so not a traditional text, and so forth, but filtering by ISBN will _not_ filter out duplicates.

There is also the problem of the same work being published under multiple titles (and also ISBNs) --- Hal Clement's _Small Changes_ was re-published as _Space Lash_ and that short story collection is now collected in:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph...

along with others.

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Re:Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive? by notpushkin on Thursday June 05, 2025 @05:25AM (#44189892)
Hmmm, yeah, ISBN isn’t great for this. Is there a good way to deduplicate the books by their contents?
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Re:Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive? by WillAdams on Thursday June 05, 2025 @07:07AM (#44190440)
LoC or Dewey Decimal with author and title (and edition?) should work.

I wish there was some better book cataloging/organizing scheme --- the Online Books Page uses LoC:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/subjects.html

and is the most workable of the indices I've used.

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