The winning submission [0] was discussed on HN recently [1]. It's highly impressive from both technical decisions and graphic design viewpoints, it somehow elegantly visualizes 2 billion books (in a way that resembles a bookcase no less).
But in terms of comparison of yours to bwv, I don't agree that bwv's is technically superior in every way. It lacks comparison, ISBN selection and link creation. bwv's main focus looks to be that one feature to highlight the rare books without trying to get the other requirements that AA wanted.
Congrats to you too! Indeed, I think they could have improved the visual and comparison part, its a bit dark and not too interesting to look at. But I am envious of how smooth their tiling is. My tiles are 4096x4096 which allows me to satisfy both the 20,000 file limit and the max 20mb file limit imposed by cloudflare. I had some issues with smaller tiles, and wanting to host it on cloudflare restricted me from doing 512x512 tiles iirc. Also I really like that they extracted the publisher information and put that as a pmtile vector, thats something I attempted but ultimately ran out of time with.
Its due to how those ISBN ranges were handed out - I think they probably gave a block like 978-53 (for example) to those countries, meaning the right to distributed ISBNs 978-530-000-000 to 978-539-999-999 and then later they ran out or had all subblocks distributed to publishers, and then they got a new block further away (so not 978-54 in my example) and therefore those blocks are not numerically close to each other and thus also they are separate "islands" in the hilbert space.
I’m glad you said that, because I was also surprised by the fact that the bwv-1011 only made it to honorable mention even though its technical focus was on visualizing the rarity of books, which ostensibly was the primary objective of the whole effort.
I really like that your page talks about _why_ a Hilbert curve is good. I don't remember ever learning about those before, and now hopefully if I'm ever trying to visualize 1D data, I might remember that :)
I searched for 'Stubborn Attachments' which worked.
On the same bookshelf there are several other Stripe Press books.
One of them is called Zero to One Hundred, by Stephanie Friedman.
When you search that book on Amazon, it has a different title, which I guess is reasonable as the book hasn't been published yet and they may not have finalized the decision: https://a.co/d/bQX5CNf
Here's where it gets weird:
- if you search for the book 'Zero to one hundred' (the title shown on the 'shelf') it doesn't come up
- if you search for the book by its ISBN, it does come up, but the name displayed in the search results is yet another alternate title. And the bookshelf displays that title. So the same part of the bookshelf looks different depending on what you searched for.
I haven't yet read the blog post about how this impressive visualization works, so I don't have an idea of why this is the case.
I don't think it's the tool that's the issue, I think it's the book itself?
If you search the ISBN on the web, you'll get "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover of "Built to Grow" and vice versa.
There's also "Experiment, Build, Scale" which is the book that the visualisation shows, also with the same ISBN attributed to the previous two.
Experiment, Build, Scale seems to be the only book of Stephanie's that is in Google Books while Worldcat has "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover art for "Built to Grow".
Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.
> Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.
I think that's an uncharitable read of the GP's comment. I read it as curiosity about how the upstream data issues present in the tool, which also interests the part of my brain that likes to solve minor mysteries.
Sorry I didn't mean to make it seem like I think the tool is at fault.
I just think it's interesting that the book title shows differently on the shelf depending on whether you reach it via an ISBN search, vs. if you discover it by panning from a nearby book.
Fascinating. It allows for some interesting observations when you as I zoom in on this one (sadly no direct links to coords/zoom level) https://archive.anarchy.cool/maps/isbn.html You can find publishers like Hueber Verlag[1] in the eastern part of the German language section. They spread their ISBN numbers in a pattern with something like 1360000 between them (I know, ISBN having a checksum leads to gaps in the numbering), which generates a repetitive pattern with plenty of empty space. It is so wasteful on this huge chunk they have.
Are there no rules on how publishers have to assign their numbers? Just so they could hand back an unused block if they don't need it any longer.
I feel like visualizations of large datasets which are viewer-directed (i.e. they want you to "explore" the data instead of trying to tell you something specific about it or communicate a narrative) are often "pretty" but never particularly enlightening. I feel like that holds true for these in particular.
That's my issue with attempts to 3D-ify viz. Unless you are actually modeling a 3D volume, like medical imaging or CAD, the added "forced exploration" of 3D simply hides insights.
- publisher
- assigned title
- (roughly) order of publication
That's all that they communicate --- there is no hierarchy here to aid in discovery or to organize the content (and further complicating things, the same text may appear multiple times in a different binding --- a differentiation which is immaterial to an e-book).
The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site, so what they are showcasing is how compleat (and brazen) their theft (and attendant lack of compensation) is.
> The thing is, ISBNs map to:
> - publisher - assigned title - (roughly) order of publication
I assume the task isn't just to visualize isbns literally. Presumably you are allowed to cross reference with other data.
> The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site,
I think its pretty clear that the target audience doesn't care. I don't think the target audience holding differing political views is really a valid critcism of the project. It should be evaluated in the context and audience it was created for.
> This would be far more interesting if it were based on an hierarchical system such as LoC, and instead afforded an interface for accessing legitimately available books
They do half of the work (which is a helluva lot)... the other half is done by the volunteers that digitize books.
I was looking at my country's "shelve" and it's so sad to see so many missing titles. I almost wanted to go to my local livrary and digitize sone of them. The old ones that are out of print and imposible to acquire right now...
Readit News
[0]: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-i...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897120
But honestly, I find both of these better: - https://bwv-1011.github.io/isbn-viewer/ - https://anna.candyland.page/map-sample.html
in particular the one from bwv is technically similar but just all around better than mine, it is what I would want mine to be
But in terms of comparison of yours to bwv, I don't agree that bwv's is technically superior in every way. It lacks comparison, ISBN selection and link creation. bwv's main focus looks to be that one feature to highlight the rare books without trying to get the other requirements that AA wanted.
One thing I found odd.
I searched for 'Stubborn Attachments' which worked.
On the same bookshelf there are several other Stripe Press books.
One of them is called Zero to One Hundred, by Stephanie Friedman.
When you search that book on Amazon, it has a different title, which I guess is reasonable as the book hasn't been published yet and they may not have finalized the decision: https://a.co/d/bQX5CNf
Here's where it gets weird:
- if you search for the book 'Zero to one hundred' (the title shown on the 'shelf') it doesn't come up
- if you search for the book by its ISBN, it does come up, but the name displayed in the search results is yet another alternate title. And the bookshelf displays that title. So the same part of the bookshelf looks different depending on what you searched for.
I haven't yet read the blog post about how this impressive visualization works, so I don't have an idea of why this is the case.
If you search the ISBN on the web, you'll get "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover of "Built to Grow" and vice versa.
There's also "Experiment, Build, Scale" which is the book that the visualisation shows, also with the same ISBN attributed to the previous two.
Experiment, Build, Scale seems to be the only book of Stephanie's that is in Google Books while Worldcat has "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover art for "Built to Grow".
Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.
I think that's an uncharitable read of the GP's comment. I read it as curiosity about how the upstream data issues present in the tool, which also interests the part of my brain that likes to solve minor mysteries.
I just think it's interesting that the book title shows differently on the shelf depending on whether you reach it via an ISBN search, vs. if you discover it by panning from a nearby book.
Are there no rules on how publishers have to assign their numbers? Just so they could hand back an unused block if they don't need it any longer.
[1] I can see how publishing learning material in 30 languages can give people "ideas" when assigning ISBN numbers https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hueber_Verlag
- publisher - assigned title - (roughly) order of publication
That's all that they communicate --- there is no hierarchy here to aid in discovery or to organize the content (and further complicating things, the same text may appear multiple times in a different binding --- a differentiation which is immaterial to an e-book).
The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site, so what they are showcasing is how compleat (and brazen) their theft (and attendant lack of compensation) is.
This would be far more interesting if it were based on an hierarchical system such as LoC, and instead afforded an interface for accessing legitimately available books as are available from https://www.gutenberg.org/ or listed at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ or worked on at: https://www.wikibooks.org/
I assume the task isn't just to visualize isbns literally. Presumably you are allowed to cross reference with other data.
> The elephant in the room of course is the matter that "Anna's Archive" is not a legitimate book repository, but a piracy site,
I think its pretty clear that the target audience doesn't care. I don't think the target audience holding differing political views is really a valid critcism of the project. It should be evaluated in the context and audience it was created for.
Isn't this exactly what Open Library does?
My entry is still live for now for anyone curious:
https://d199hl4t3ts6d9.cloudfront.net/
I was looking at my country's "shelve" and it's so sad to see so many missing titles. I almost wanted to go to my local livrary and digitize sone of them. The old ones that are out of print and imposible to acquire right now...
So much knowledge lost.