useful links for book research

Oneiros · Post by **Oneiros** » Thu Mar 13, 2003 4:12 pm

Here are some more links to science fiction bibliographical resources on the web:

The Locus index to science fiction, among other things contains a very useful series list
Fantastic Fiction offers bibliographies for over 3000 authors
The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase is an effort to catalog works of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, and offers award and fiction search facilities
The Linkoping SF/Fantasy Archive, with book and movie reviews archived from Usenet, also contains the SF Resource Guide, the oldest and most comprehensive such collection
SciFan offers bibliographies and biographies for SF/Fantasy writers
Spacelight is a collection of 'statistics and vital data' for SF/F writers, often the last hope for finding material on venerable authors of those genres
The CyberSpace Spinner Archive of Speculative Fiction is composed of directories for bibliographies, writer pseudonyms, awards, and literature and cinema archival information

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Oct 22, 2003 10:52 am

Some more links:

The Booklist Center - just what the name says, a collection of booklists of all sorts, focusing on awards, but with some themed lists as well.

Academy of American poets. Includes a biography, photo, and partial bibliography for American (and some significant non-American) poets
Voices from the Gaps. North American woman writers of color. Biographies, lists of works, quotations, links. This is part of a University website, so the information is pretty accurate.
American Authors. Another good scholarly website. Includes bibliographies and links
Contemporary Writers. UK authors
a.ka. A list of pseudonyms, alternate names, etc. for over 4,000 authors.
Litteraturnet Danish authors. Bibliographies include Danish titles as well as English.
DBNL auteurs Bibliographies for authors from the Netherlands. (site is in Dutch)
The Literary Gothic. Gothic writers
SAWNET. South Asian Women writers
PGIL-EIRData.org. research database for Irish authors.
Prehistoric fiction Bibliography of prehistoric fiction novels. Includes covers and publisher synposes.
Australian Literature. Nice website devoted to Australian authors. Information seems accurate and fairly complete.
The Literary Encyclopedia. Focuses on biographies, many bibliographies incomplete, but information should be fairly accurate.

Gamebook database. gameing book database, by series. I've been using this for the choose-your-own adventure books
Forgotten Realms - The Library. information about the Forgotten Realms books, by title, series, and author
Dr. Who Reference Guide. good information on the various series and books.

Thrilling Detective. Mystery novels. Mostly series books. Information is generally pretty accurate.
Stop You're Killing Me!. Another mystery website. I haven't used this one as much, and I'm not sure whether it's reliable.
Classic crime fiction

Ancient Greece in Fiction. list of titles by historical period. Very extensive.
Fictional Rome. Searchable database. Also includes a short story listing.

Library of Congress website. This is sometimes the only source for information on out-of-print and hard-to-find books. It includes the original title of foreign language books, and children's books published later than ca. 1960 have a one-sentence summary of the plot. However, it is unfortunately rather hard to use due to session time-out errors, and the information can sometimes be woefully incomplete.

isbndb · Post by **isbndb** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 8:24 pm

A little bit of self-promotion, sure, but I hope you guys find it useful:

ISBNdb -- http://isbndb.com/

Basically it's a library spider that collects books information from public libraries all across the world. It allows to browse books and download original MARC records for those who have programs that can use them. A web service that will allow to embed that data into applications and other web sites is in development now.

Feel free to ask questions, I'll try to answer.

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:02 pm

I'm posting again to bump the thread up to the top and call attention to it for anyone who may not have seen it. I've been updating my list periodically as I come across new sites.

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Sep 29, 2004 9:51 pm

I would be careful about using information from certain sites without checking for accuracy. Two in particular:

Fantastic Fiction is full of errors and should not be relied upon. Mostly, these are incorrect dates for books, but I wouldn't copy ISBNs or synopses from this site either. However, they are a good source for cover pics.

SciFan doesn't have nearly as many problems as Fantastic Fiction, but I've encountered enough errors in dates not to trust it overmuch.

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 10:57 am

Ha! Figured out how to post this as a sticky! Now it should stay at the top.

Post by **KiltanneN** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 11:41 am

The is a great resource Spiphany. You may care to check out this resource as well:
http://www.iblistforums.com/links.php

and you could always start putting the links into that location whenever you feel energetic...

mccormack44 · Post by **mccormack44** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 9:09 pm

Thank you for these sources. I'm trying to build a relational database for our home library (a home "catalog") which is necessary, since we have over 5000 titles in our main collection, about 600 cookbooks and about 1200 Crafts, Art Instruction, and General Reference books.

Copyright and publisher I can get from the books, "shelf location" is my job as "librarian," but author information usually needs to come from elsewhere. I'm sure that these sources will help me a great deal. Thank you again.

Sue

aibotak · Post by **aibotak** » Fri Apr 14, 2006 9:47 pm

These two are decent ebook source to everything else in my opinion.
http://www.gutenberg.org & http://www.pustakamaya.com

Post by **KiltanneN** » Thu Nov 02, 2006 5:18 am

site for some possible assistance...

http://contento.best.vwh.net/

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 3:58 pm

I've been working on compiling a list of publishers' websites, mostly one's I've found useful at one time or another. -- this is not by any means complete, and I (usually) haven't listed all the different imprints of a publisher separately, but should be a good starting place for research purposes (or if any editors are bored and want to work on adding the catalogs of some of the smaller presses). If anyone has additions, feel free to post them; I'll try to update this periodically.

Allen & Unwin
Amber Lane Press
Anderson Press
Angus & Robinson
Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
Arcade Publishing
Ardis Books
Ariadne Press
Arkham House
Aurora Metro Press
Baen Books
Bitter Lemon Press
Bloomsbury
Brooklyn Publishers
Calder Publications
Cambridge University Press
Camden House
Canongate
Carcanet Press
Carroll and Graf
City Lights
Chicken House
Coffee House Press
Constable & Robinson
Cornell University Press
Currency Press
Dalkey Archive Press
DAW Books
Dedalus Books
Dorchester Publishing (imprints iinclude Leisure Books, Love Spell)
Dover Publications
Dramatic Publishing
Dramatist's Play Service
EDGE and Tesseract Books
Egmont Books
Elridge Plays & Musicals
Faber & Faber (note: I can't seem to get their website to load properly)
Frances Lincoln
Green Integer
Green Knight Publishing
Grove/Atlantic
Harcourt
Harlequin
HarperCollins
Harvard University Press
Hesperus Press
Hodder Headline
I. E. Clark Publications
Intellect Publishing
Joseph Weinberger
Kensington Books
Kodansha
Macmillan
McPherson & Company
Methuen
New Directions (catalog does not seem to include descriptions, however)
New York Review of Books Classics
Nick Hern Books
North-South Books
Northwestern University Press
Oberon Books
Omnidawn
Orion Books
Usborne
Overlook Press
Oxford University Press
Penguin Group (and a useful subject catalog)
Peter Lang
Pioneer Drama Service
Post-Apollo Press
Prime Books
Prometheus Books
PS Publishing
Pushkin Press
Random House
Samuel French (UK)
Serpent's Tail
Severn House
Shambhala
Simon & Schuster
St. Martin's Press
SUNY Press
Tachyon Publications
TOR Books
Time Warner Books (Hachette)
Twisted Spoon Press
Ugly Duckling Presse
University of Nebraska Press
University of Queensland Press
Virago Press
Voyager (part of Harper Collins)
WW Norton & Company
Wheatland Press
Wildside Press
Zephyr Press

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 10:18 am

In case anyone cares, I just found a website which lists publishers and their imprints -- the amount of imprints is staggering, but it should be very useful for sorting out which ones belong to whom.

http://www.publisherlookup.org/

mccormack44 · Post by **mccormack44** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 6:33 pm

This site looks like it will help me LOTS when I get back to handling publishing data.

I have dropped publication data for the time being, because I haven't designed the best way to include it in my relational database. But mainly because of the wipeout I created last March. Having caught up with that, I'm scurrying through the final two bookcases, before I round up all the loose books and oddly shelved books in our home. But we DO need to add the publisher's data and this source will help me clarify some of the odder imprints I find in our books.

Post by **wolfspirit** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 6:45 pm

spiphany wrote:In case anyone cares, I just found a website which lists publishers and their imprints -- the amount of imprints is staggering, but it should be very useful for sorting out which ones belong to whom.

http://www.publisherlookup.org/

Thanks for reminding me, spip, that I have to write the code for publisher/imprint nesting in WEM.

*me adds yet more to his to-do list*

Scott

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 10:06 pm

The Standard Index of Short Stories 1900-1914 is available in full-text format from Google Books. It indexes a bunch of magazines from the period, and I've been finding it useful for original publication info for some now-obscure short stories in a couple of anthologies I have.

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:24 pm

Homeville (which has a number of short story indexes, including the Locus index posted above) moved recently; the new address for the main directory is at http://www.philsp.com/homeville/

Post by **gollum** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 11:20 pm

A way to find a list of ISBN's for a work - not restricted to US releases.

http://old-xisbn.oclc.org/xid/isbn/xxx << replace xxx with a known ISBN

or for robots, add an ISBN to the URL... http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/ << add a known ISBN

either methods returns a non-formatted xml list.

If anyone shows an interest I'll attempt an [Greasemonkey/IE7Pro/Opera] user script to act as a intermediary or 'helper'

mccormack44 · Post by **mccormack44** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 11:21 pm

I have a general question that has often come up while I work on our home library. How do you find out whether this is two different people with the same name? If a now retired pseudonym is actually the name on the spine of the bookâ€”or if it is the other author? If there is both an author and an artist by the same name, or if the artist also writes? (And so on.)

Sue

Post by **gollum** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:07 am

Sue here's a few links to some pseudonym discovery sites...

a.k.a. 11612 entries (4177 'real' + 7435 'pseudo')
http://www.trussel.com/books/pseudo.htm

Science Fiction Author Pseudonyms
http://www.hycyber.com/SF/author_pseudo.html
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/bibliography/ ... name01.htm (birth-death info + notes)

Pseudonyms of Horror and Fantasy Writers
http://www.hycyber.com/HF/pseudo_writers.html

Mystery and Suspense Pseudonym Directories
http://www.hycyber.com/MYST/pseudo_dir.html

--Greg

P.S. I got these by...
/ shameless plug
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=00626 ... av0aspnflw

and typing in pseudonym

(may help your Book Research in other ways)
/ ends shameless plug

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:25 pm

Figuring out whether a name refers to two different people or to a single person can be tricky. I've been doing a lot more of this since IBList started including translators and editors in addition to authors. Unfortunately, there's no single good way to confirm this. I usually start out by checking dates, whatever biographical information I can find about the author of one of the books. If there's a clear disjunction between dates or locations (book A was written in 1890, book B in 1950, or one is by a UK author, the other illustrated by an Australian), I assume they're different. If that fails (both books were published during roughly the same period) I will usually check the Library of Congress catalog (loc.gov), which has separate entries for different people with the same name (usually with additional information such as date of birth/death and middle name/initial). There are definitely omissions and occasional inaccuracies, but several times I have been able to confirm that two books were indeed written or translated by the same person.

A final note on pseudonyms: check the copyright page of the book. Often (although not always) a book written under a pseudonym will be credited to the author under their real name on the copyright page.

(Are you sure we can't convince you to become an editor with IBList? You're interested in precisely the kind of problems which the database is designed to handle.)

mccormack44 · Post by **mccormack44** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 11:24 pm

spiphany wrote:(Are you sure we can't convince you to become an editor with IBList? You're interested in precisely the kind of problems which the database is designed to handle.)

I think, perhaps, in 6 months to a year I might be able to volunteer, but my available time right now is all tied up in trying to get our own books (roughly 7000 in all categories and still accumulating) into storage packaging and onto shelving which will let us FIND them when we want them!

Thank you for your reference to the Library of Congress Reference. I have been splitting by era, but didn't think about geography. Sometimes it is hard to get any dates to go on. I have also responded somewhat to copyright page information, but am not sure how to evaluate it.

And GOLLUM: thank you also for your contribution. I was aware of a.k.a. (having learned about right here) but not of the other sites you listed. I will be using them in the future.

Thank you both.

Sue

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 6:50 pm

Literature in Context - this looks like a valuable resource for foreign (mostly central and east European) literature. Author biographies, bibliographies and info on secondary sources and translations. Because the sponsor is a Dutch university, info on English translations is sometimes sketchy.

Polish culture contains a section with profiles of Polish authors and their bibliographies (and some translation info)

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 11:00 am

http://fictiondb.com/ -- good source for cover images & synopses, especially for romance and genre fiction. Some of their features are limited to members, but they apparently just recently opened it up so that most of the information is available to everyone.

(To be perfectly honest -- I'm jealous. They seem to be doing much the same thing we are, but extremely more efficiently. Then again, I think they have resources we don't...)

spiphany · Post by **spiphany** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 1:36 pm

Several collections of cover scans for anyone who may be searching for cover images of older books -- a couple of these sites also sometimes include back cover scans or the text of the blurbs.

http://www.bookscans.com/
http://www.vintagepbks.com/
http://tikit.net/
http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/
http://www.bookcoverarchive.com/
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jimthing/
http://www.modernlib.com/ToC/Members.html
http://www.betweenthecovers.com/btc

Zybahn · Post by **Zybahn** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 3:49 pm

www.coverbrowser.com is great for older books, especially pulps.
The A-Z index includes such gems as Ace Books, Vintage Books, & so forth.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction

useful links for book research

Re: useful links for book research