Comment by rahimnathwani
1 year ago
This is amazing.
One thing I found odd.
I searched for 'Stubborn Attachments' which worked.
On the same bookshelf there are several other Stripe Press books.
One of them is called Zero to One Hundred, by Stephanie Friedman.
When you search that book on Amazon, it has a different title, which I guess is reasonable as the book hasn't been published yet and they may not have finalized the decision: https://a.co/d/bQX5CNf
Here's where it gets weird:
- if you search for the book 'Zero to one hundred' (the title shown on the 'shelf') it doesn't come up
- if you search for the book by its ISBN, it does come up, but the name displayed in the search results is yet another alternate title. And the bookshelf displays that title. So the same part of the bookshelf looks different depending on what you searched for.
I haven't yet read the blog post about how this impressive visualization works, so I don't have an idea of why this is the case.
I don't think it's the tool that's the issue, I think it's the book itself?
If you search the ISBN on the web, you'll get "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover of "Built to Grow" and vice versa.
There's also "Experiment, Build, Scale" which is the book that the visualisation shows, also with the same ISBN attributed to the previous two.
Experiment, Build, Scale seems to be the only book of Stephanie's that is in Google Books while Worldcat has "Zero to One Hundred" with the cover art for "Built to Grow".
Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.
> Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.
I think that's an uncharitable read of the GP's comment. I read it as curiosity about how the upstream data issues present in the tool, which also interests the part of my brain that likes to solve minor mysteries.
Sorry I didn't mean to make it seem like I think the tool is at fault.
I just think it's interesting that the book title shows differently on the shelf depending on whether you reach it via an ISBN search, vs. if you discover it by panning from a nearby book.