Visualizing All ISBNs

What property makes the Hilbert curve desirable compared to, say, a snake pattern, with which neighbouring ISBNs are also neighbours in the visualisation?

The worry I have with Hilbert curves is that they make the result look like there are distinct "squares" of data [0] when really this is just an artifact of how Hilbert curves work. In that sense, the current visualization is more useful, because it's straightforward to identify the location of each country in it.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert/maste...

And there's a generalized Hilbert curve, the Gilbert curve, for non powers of two rectangular regions [0] (online demo [1]).

[0] https://github.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert

[1] https://jakubcerveny.github.io/gilbert/demo/

ISBN's are hierarchical, what do you mean? Like Gaul, ISBNs are divided into multiple parts, where one part is for the language, another is for the publisher, and the last is for the title. The last part is a checksum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#Overview

It shows what they want to show, which is mostly how much of the world books they have. Hierarchical has nothing to do with it.

One thing it shows is how ISBNs are allocated much faster than they are used, judging by the amount of black pixels.

The image contains 1000*800 pixels at 2500 ISBNs per pixel, so it's visualizing 2e9 ISBNs. ISBN-13 contains 12 digits plus one check digit, so we might have expected the image to be 500 times bigger/denser than the current image. The fact that it's at its current size suggests that only ISBNs with 978 and 979 prefixes are included, and since the bottom half is more sparse, that probably corresponds to the new 979 range.

Fwiw (not color-blind) I can see red, green and black pixels. The graph doesn't look weird to the naked eye.

Find the interactive visualiser by scrolling down, and switch it to "Files in Anna's Archive [md5]". This will highlight the location of the green pixels in grey.

If you have red-green blindness like me try this:

- Right-click the image and select "Inspect".

- Add a new CSS hue-rotate filter to the element:

    element {
       max-width: 100%;
       margin: 0 auto;
       filter: hue-rotate(-90deg);
    }

The graph seems to be alright, there are indeed red and (some) green pixels, looks like an issue with your extension unfortunately.

I see green dots and a few lines of green dots. Did you try zooming in?

No idea of were the issue might land, but I can see the difference in colors.

I am also color blind and the graph is not good.

I see red, green, and a bit of yellow. I assume the yellow is what happens when the red and green pixels come too close to each other.

The graphs are very easy to read, albeit depend on your ability to distinguish between red and green.

Can you change the green channel to blue to better view it?

Works in Poland, but here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250106112552/https://annas-arc...

Running your own recursive resolver has certain advantages…

No issue here in France.

No issue in Finland.

It's the largest collection of books in easy to download formats for e-readers (often epub).

Yes. A DNS request for annas-archive.org to my ISP (EE in the UK) returns an address for www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk, which also gives a security warning. If I click through the warning on either site I get an HTTP 400 error.

According to Wikipedia, www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk used to list the blocked domains and the court orders responsible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_th...

No, sounds like you are being mitm for them. Though the domain appears like a legitimate CDN.

I get a valid-looking cert issued by Google Trust Services. Finnish ISP's DNS.

Same for me

Making it easier to visualise is the whole point of the bounty announced by this post.

I don't think this page, which links to libgen and sci-hub, is that concerned about copyright.

I'd suggest you try a color blindness test. The green is very obvious, especially about 40% of the way down the whole image.

If you look closely there are definitely some brownish pixels and some dim greens.

I think the website is censored at DNS level but they chose the wrong error page.

In Italy it just errors out with a NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED.

Works fine here from a European IP.

Switch DNS to like 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google)

Some people in the archiving / 'data hoarding' community feel it's simpler to just back up everything. This attitude is particularly prevalent in the communities that deal with data other people have already digitised.

If you're paying $100 per book for someone to visit a major library, get the book out, scan it, check the OCR? Then you'd probably be selective, to get the most out of a limited budget.

But if you're grabbing epubs and pdfs, and a book only needs $0.002 of space on a hard drive somewhere? Grabbing the useless 41% is probably cheaper and easier than exercising editorial control.

The problem with such judgment is that they are subjective and subject to biases that change over time. Almost every scrap of information from ancient civilizations is considered priceless at this point because so few is left of it. Anything from obscene graffiti, shopping lists, personal messages, etc. All of it.

Many autocratic regimes editorialize and censure all forms of publications. But even in the US, which is nominally still a democracy you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons. And this is not just a right wing thing. There have been a few publishers that took it upon themselves to editorialize literature from the 19th and 20th century to get rid of some things that are now considered sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. The whole cancel culture is not just about canceling people, but about limiting access to their work as well.

I was at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago near the Opera. There's a nice little monument there for the book burning that happened in the 1930s. Anything that was vaguely intellectual or Jewish in origin was burned right there during the Kristallnacht. Nice place for a Christmas market and a grim reminder that those calling for things to be deleted/cancelled aren't necessarily very nice people. And of course Hitler himself got cancelled. Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany.

Anyway, imagine somebody in 5000 years finding their way to some archive of hacker news or some reddit thread might look differently at the value of some of the comments than the average moderator.

Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law) states "90% of everything is crap" so you're not too far off.

Everyone's 41% is different. Long tail, innit.

Because the efforts of Anna's Archive are unfortunately currently very much illegal, and XMR is one of the few cryptocurrencies that can actually offer some privacy to its users.

They use monero because what they are doing (copyright infringement) will get you in to big trouble anywhere in the western world. Without cryptocurrencies much of the modern large scale archival efforts wouldn't be possible, or at the very least would significantly increase risks for the people participating in it. For me this alone is a good enough reason to admit that there are valid reasons for existence of privacy coins.

The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.

Because it is a book download site, which is illegal in every country that has copyright, and revealing one's identity with a bank transfer would be a stupid way to go to jail.

>Why are they using crypto, and, weirdly enough, specifically the crypto people use for buying drugs, to award this?

You really have to ask why a illegal/grey site is using currency that is build to protect privacy and anonymity?

is this some kind of sarcasm?

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