As Dean says above, books (and other media) don’t obey standards. It seems to me, then, that we should be using any and all standards we can get our hands on to order information and make it easy to find. We shouldn’t abandon traditional information ordering standards, but why can’t we combine them with tagging and folksonomies? We shouldn’t drop everything to ape Amazon, but can’t we take the best parts of Amazon (and Google and Flickr and so on) and mash them up with traditional systems?

Anyway, thanks for giving us all something to think about.

Mr. Spalding has lodged a few rhetorical questions. For instance, “Why is it that librarians, which are mostly government or non-profit operations, whose business is based on giving information away, make it hard to get their data, but Amazon, a private corporation, makes it easy?” Short answer: investment capital. But that answer buys the premise that libraries make it hard to get their data, which is a succinct but misleading way of characterizing the situation. Sometimes data are hard to get. Take the statistical database purveyed by LexisNexis Academic Service. Even for those libraries who can afford the service, it’s simply harder to locate meaningful tabular arrangements of numbers than to find a large type edition of the latest Sue Grafton, and no amount of XML is likely to remedy this situation.

He asks, “My local library has a big expensive OPAC solution. Why can’t I sent it an ISBN and get whether they have it?” You probably can, of course, but it might take some chatting with staff and fiddling around. Some libraries assume, rightly or wrongly, that most of their users just don’t care about ISBNs and that they might be confused by the option. There’s a degree of paternalism at work here, but it’s the same rationale for prescribing output of simple data.

One can’t search LibraryThing by ISBN, and the FAQ fairly explains why. The explanation helps with the issues broached in these postings, too. The world of bibliographically expressed information—let alone tabular statistical data, feeds of news and opinion, or calendar content—is complex because, despite ISBN, books do not rigorously obey standards. “At some point, however, things get debatable,” writes Mr. Spalding in the FAQ. Precisely. A fitting retort to “Amazon is completely and utterly dominant,” or “The problem is attitudinal, not technical.” The debate results in compromise, cutting corners, prioritizing, and so forth, approaches libraries routinely pursue.

Casey is dead right about what Amazon does right. Early on, however, Amazon was much praised for their book search. I’m not sure if they got worse or our expectatins merely improved. I suspect it was the latter. I remember people saying “you just something in and it finds it, even if you didn’t get it quite right.” Back when Amazon started, that was a bit of a novelty. Since Google, our expectations have jumped again.

On the indexing, another point comes easily to mind. Casey notes that when you Google a book, the first result in generally the Amazon page. But look at the other pages and you’ll see most of THOSE will be Amazon Associates. Sometimes this is good; sometimes bad (all those AWS parasites, with none of their own content). Either way it demonstrates the enormous power of Amazon Web Services.

Step back a second and notice how weird this is. Somehow, the largest, richest sources of bibliographic data rank poorly or are completely missing from the web. The Library of Congress doesn’t come up, nor Harvard, nor Yale, nor OCLC. You don’t even get the publishers’ page, the NYT review or anything of the sort. Amazon is completely and utterly dominant.

Casey hit on this well, but here’s my re-statement of why:

(1) Technology: To a web application developer, Z39.50 and MARC records are a huge pain. There are no “easy” guides to Z39.50. Getting MARC records out of their (multiple) strange character sets is a challenge and parsing MARC records a chore. And once you parse it, you need a librian’s help to understand it. (I feel like I’ve been getting a sort of MLS-at-gunpoint developing LibraryThing.)

By contrast, Amazon’s API takes simple URLs and delivers easy-to-understand XML (eg., … ), in UTF-8. Experienced programmers know how to work AWS in minutes. Helper tools exist in every web programming language. There are places all over the web to talk about it. Thousands of web aps run on it. The fact that AWS can be used to generate Amazon Associate revenue is part of the story, but not the decisive one. There are lots of non-commercial uses of AWS too. LibraryThing is one of 17 book-cataloging sites (albeit by far the most successful one). All the others rely exclusively on AWS data.

(2) Openness: Why is it that librarians, which are mostly government or non-profit operations, whose business is based on giving information away, make it hard to get their data, but Amazon, a private corporation, makes it easy? Libraries take great pains to get books into people’s hands–but not data. The only people who use Z39.50 connections are other libraries and scholars with expensive software like EndNote.

Two obvious solutions:

1. Permanent, simple links. The immediate and painful execution of anyone who develops a session-based OPAC.

2. Quick APIs that deliver simple data. We fund the LC. Why can’t I send them an ISBN and get a title and author back? My local library has a big expensive OPAC solution. Why can’t I sent it an ISBN and get whether they have it? Why can’t I put the books I’ve taken out up on my blog? Why don’t my book return dates go right into my calendar program? Compared to everything else a library does, this stuff is trivial. The problem is attitudinal, not technical.

Let me correct that: If we had the chance to do it over, I’d say let’s do it again. Let’s make all the progress (and all the mistakes), and re-learn all of the lessons that today’s online services now take for granted.

But now that we’re here, we have to answer where we go next.

My argument speaks of some new lessons that now come from outside libraries. Yes, some of those lessons are vaguely fantastic, but they’re what keep me busy. They keep a lot of us busy.

Aside: I agree that Amazon’s search tools are rotten. Their success is elsewhere: in making recommendations and in making their content linkable/indexable. Often, when I want to find a book I just Google it. Amazon’s catalog page for the work is usually in the first page of results.

Libraries have always been rightly leery about marketing and solicitations of sales. We have largely relied for better or worse on word of mouth…and now word of mouth has been technologically appropriated. So “the success we’ve seen with online services outside the library community” becomes the touchstone for success within the library community. There are times when this baffles me: for example, I find Amazon’s search engine opaque. Long ago, searching for available books about Paul de Man, I was swamped with Amazon product about Leonardo DiCaprio. The experience permanently colored my expectations of Amazon, I admit.

Mr. Bisson is surely not the first to recognize the need to make variegated systems cooperate. This goes as well for web services as for ILSs, but it also fails to confront an almost brute fact: the more integrated and simplified the resource, the more abstract the result. Abstract results are good so long as we train our expectations to appreciate them. Our “systems,” the ones that “suck,” also happen to include online services invested with personal values, if by “systems” we mean an assemblage of things connected to form a complex unity, per the OED, more or less. Broadly construed in the spirit of convergence, the telephone is an online service, for instance. It works wonders when a library user deploys it to connect, not only to find out what the library holds, but also how the heck to render fruitful those integrated, shared interface, web based services that promise, but don’t uniformly deliver, ease of use and good results.