To show a catalog of almost 100 million books in one view, phiresky mapped them based on International Standard Book Numbers, or ISBNs, with an interactive visualization.
Large blocks of 10k to 100 million ISBNs are assigned by the International ISBN Agency to international organizations. Then, each country has their own method of subdividing their blocks into publishers.
The important part is that ISBN blocks are always assigned by prefix. For example, 978-4 is assigned to Japan, and Japan assigned 978-4-312 to one publisher. That publisher then assigns the articles 000000-99999, leading to an ISBN of 978-4-312-99999-X, where X is a checksum. The longer the country prefix is, the fewer books can be assigned within it. For example, while Japan has a space of 100 million ISBNs, Singapore has a prefix of 978-9971-, allowing only 100 thousand ISBNs.
You can easily browse by panning and zooming like you would a modern web map. You can also search for books, and you’ll float right in to the spot on the bookshelf:
Code for the project is available on GitHub.
It was the winning entry to an open call by Anna’s Archive, a shadow library trying to catalog all the books. You can find other submissions here.
