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@dalias @brokengoose @LPerry2 @josh0 It's amazingly difficult to find good book data. Most things use Amazon's database (with all of the tracking that comes with) because everything else is so much worse.

Publishers seem to treat their slice of the ISBN database as something to sell, rather than something that, as part of the commons, would increase the value of the books that they sell. This means any kind of mapping between ISBNs and books is hard (and it's a many-to-many relationship since an ISBN identifies a print volume, which may be a single edition of a book or an omnibus edition that includes multiple logical books). Building any kind of meaningful ontology on top of this is really hard. Wikidata trues but is missing a lot of things.

LibraryThing provided services to libraries before being bought by Amazon but their data is really bad. Lots of books seem to have been entered by using computer vision on the cover so the title fields include every word on the cover, such as 'the new novel in the X series' and so on. So much value is lost to society by there being no maintained database for this. I suspect the amount that half a dozen libraries pay as a result of it not existing could completely fund its development and maintenance.