Brugge Blog

I mentioned in an earlier post that I liked using an alternative to Amazon for book links, since I want to give people a place to find out information about the book, not to entice them to buy it.

Now I ran across the Wikipedia Book Sources special page (here’s what it looks like with a sample ISBN). The number of choices to search for a book is overwhelming - “I don’t want to look through 100 libraries and bookstores, I want the web to look through them for me!” - but perhaps it’s not meant to be what I’m wanting it to be. It seems, instead, that it is trying to be too much, being everything for everybody (why would I want to look for a book in a Lithuanian library? Sure, somebody might, but not me). The discussion section for this page seems to echo this thought, but in a collaborative venture like the Wikipedia, I think that this type of page is hard to reduce.

There are a couple of useful links that I got out of it though:

• The Library Of Congress site, with an example of how to form queries (copy this link)
• The WikiBooks companion site, reminding me that there is a lot to Wikipedia that I obviously haven’t explored yet