Comment 2 for bug 353653

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George (george-archive) wrote :

Hi Jeroen,

Sorry it's taken me a while to find this... (The bug was created before I started at OL.)

We'd love to have PG books on Open Library! I think there's a way we might be able to do it soon too.

One thing we're working on is allowing Open Library records to accumulate identifiers from various other systems. For now we only collect ISBN, LCCN, LC, Dewey and a couple of others. The idea is that the more identifiers we can collect, the more connectors we might provide between various systems.

The Internet Archive is also working on another thing we're calling "BookServer" - the idea is a distributed vending and lending system over the Internet, where publishers or booksellers can release a feed out onto the web that's aggregated by a service like Open Library. People try a search of these aggregated feeds on something like Open Library, and then are directed back to the origin... in your case, Project Gutenberg. There *might* be a way we could morph the feeds you already issue into BookServer, but I'm not the right person to answer that.

In any case, a goal for Open Library would be to represent any and all sources of actual copies of books for reading, buying or borrowing whenever someone is looking at our records. PG is definitely one of those sources :)