This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0]

Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not.

Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists...

I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form.

[0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...

Sometimes we definitely want 'items' though, so for example I am in a physical bookstore and see a book I might be interested in, so I buy it, to find out later back home that I already have the very same book - and edition - already. It's a scenario that anyone with some amount of books definitely encountered multiple times, I know I did it myself a few times. :)

Ability of an ISBN search of my collection would have helped me in this case - scanning a barcode is easy enough task to accomplish.

And even if I had a different edition, the resulting title from searching for a different edition would be enough to help me figure out that I should not buy a book I already own.

When you delve into real domain specific knowledge, surprises often surface and it turns out that what you might think is a simple thing is actually rather complicated.

I'm mildly surprised at exactly how successful ISBNs are. I worked in a book wholesaler's warehouse 35 odd years ago and the ISBN was used as the product code by the "system". I'd get a series of picking lists for pallets on good old green "staved" fan fold. I'd whizz around the warehouse with my trolley and pick from paper packets of books. The product lines had the rack and bay, last four from the SBN, quantity, title and full SBN. The packets of books had the rack/bay/last four from SBN printed on a label in large and small other details. I got very good at optimising my course around the warehouse and could pick at a right old rate, whilst listening to my mini cassette player. Its pretty boring work so you might as well game it!

Sometimes an individual book might fall off my trolley and be dumped in the big cardboard "skip" for rejects. For some reason casualties around me generally involved subjects like maths, material sciences, geology, surveying, hydrology. Oh and fractals!

I graduated in civil engineering.

Anyway. Surely all of us here know that really getting to grips with defining what it is that you are cataloguing/indexing/numbering/whatever and why can be quite tricky.

Both Dewey and SBNs catalogue "books" but for very different reasons. Both systems are extremely successful. You might think that in our world of LLMs n that, that books, Dewey and SBNs will go the way of the dodo.

Perhaps, but I doubt it.

Right, bugger all this old school nonsense. I've got a C64 (it rocks a SD card interface and a HDMI out (via SCART - must sort that out)) blinking away on my telly in the sittingroom and some mutant camels need a bloody good kicking.

If anyone in the comments is in a similar predicament to the author and would like a book logging app, I will say that I disagree on their judgement of StoryGraph - I've found it a pretty decent interface, the search function is very good, and the (anti)features mentioned in the footnote are incredibly easy to not use, as the creators seem to understand that many of their users have a very strong preference to avoid AI bloat.

I'm not sure we always want 'works'. Sometimes different 'expressions' of the same work are different enough that they don't have the same value.

For example, compare the most recent edition of 'Straight and crooked thinking' with the one published in 1930.

This also fails to take into account that ISBNs also contain the publisher ID in them. So identical copies of a book could have different ISBNs depending on which markets they are sold in.

My state had a reading competition that listed books by ISBN, which was a real challenge for students to track down. Each library had different editions and even different cover art, so if you “found” the book you might not recognise it on the shelf, etc…

I worked on the library systems and one of my innovations was to use the ISBN mapping database of WorldCat to find books with identical content but different ISBNs to help kids find the books on the list.

Over ten years that one SQL join in the code made the kids read an extra million books they wouldn’t have otherwise.

My biggest “bang for buck” in my career!

If the author sees this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 might be relevant as it relates to catalogue completeness. OpenLibrary is very good, but Anna's Archive is potentially more complete.

The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a better summary of the issue.

tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number, within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very much matters.

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I read that it's much worse than that, and there are ISBNs that were reused for completely different books.