Do Lists Of Published Works Exist?

tl;dr: Does anybody know of a site/API where I can find a list of books published by an author? Before you answer “just use Wikipedia/Goodreads/Amazon/openlibrary”, read on…

After tinkering with my bookiez.el package today, I naturally started to want to buy more books. I was thinking about implementing something that would alert me when authors I particularly like release something new, if that’s simple to implement.

So I was looking at (to take a random example) David Sedaris:

The last book I have is from 2018? He must have published something after that, but how to find out?

Because if you go to Goodreads and sort by publication year, you get this:

And there two things on the top there do indeed look like new books, and I bought them from Bookshop.org. But what are the rest of those things? Yes, indeed, they’re radio shows, and then a collection, and then… er… a Kindle essay, and then there’s…

OK, so I tried openlibrary.org, but it has the similar problems, as evidenced by the first screenshot up there. Among the 122 books Sedaris has published (apparently), there’s “A Carnival of Snackery Lib/E”, “A Carnival of Snackery”, “Carnival of Snackeries : Diaries”, “Carnival of Snackery : Diaries”, and finally of course, “Carnival of Snackery”.

I don’t know whether this phenomenon has a name… “The Tragedy Of The Pedantry?” You see this problem all the time, like on discogs. If you’re trying to buy all albums by Joe Jackson, you get an overview that starts with this:

The first two things are indeed his first two albums, but then you get an “album” by the BBC Transcription Service (these were vinyls they sent out to far-away broadcasting outposts like the BBC offices in Gibraltar, so that they could play some rockin’ Joe Jackson live to the people in Gibraltar — good work by the BBC). BUT I DIGRESS.

If only there was a button on the form where people submit data like this like “is this something you thing that reasonable people would consider an actual ‘new release’ by this person?” button. I know, that takes using common sense and having some taste (is a collected edition a “new release”? a translation? an illustrated edition?), so it’s basically impossible, but it sure would be nice to have a button when viewing these lists that says “hide effluvia”.

I guess the best one can hope for is Wikipedia:

But the nerds at Wikipedia are so geeky — it’s not as apparent here, but if you look at somebody who does series, it’s almost impossible to see whether they’ve done any new books lately. As an example, C. J. Cherryh:

And that goes on and on, and you basically have to read the entire thing to see whether she’s done anything new lately.

I find all this not only annoying, but slightly bewildering: There’s readers that want to buy books, and they’re fans of certain authors, so they want to be reminded that there are new books when there are new books. And by “new books” all readers mean “has this author written a new book and it has been published?”, and usually nothing else.

If you manage to eventually find the “all books” for an author on Amazon, for instance, and manage to select “publication date”, you get this:

OK, English only…

What? Oh, there’s a 3 book collection set… and a kindle edition… OK, I don’t care about Kindle, I just want papery books:

GAAAH

So there is no way on Amazon to get it to list out new books by an author — they’d have to do the tagging I describe above, and obviously that’s not something a small startup like Amazon has the means to do.

Sorry for the lame joke, but they actually used to do this when they were a small startup — you could get a list of “works by” sorted by publication order, so that you can, you know, buy stuff.

And of course, just searching for “david sedaris” just gives you popular books…

Changing to “newest arrivals” gives you junk — OK, there’s two things in the first line by David Sedaris, but nothing that could be called “a new work by”.

So I’m just asking the Internet in general: Has anybody, somewhere, made a web site that lists works by authors in a way that can be used to check whether somebody has published a new book lately?

I’m guessing not, because that just seems totally impossible, but I thought I’d ask.

Oh, for giggles I tried ChatGPT:

Which starts off pretty reasonably…

But ends in 2003!? (Same with 4.5.)

After chatting a bit with it to list David Sedaris books, I got it to stop trying to divide things into sections, but it includes things like “Themes and Variations” that’s a Kindle essay, as well as “The Best Of Me” which is a compilation. But this doesn’t stop in 2003, at least.

LLMs are notoriously not very up-to-date, so it’s not ideal for the functionality I have in mind. And I don’t want to. But I’m guessing that’s going to be my best bet? I have to get a doctorate in prompt engineering first.

A Book Tracking Package for Emacs

In 2013, I got tired of rooting through the book cases every time I bought a new book (to see whether I already had it, because who can remember those things).

So I bought an ISBN bar scanner, and whipped up some basic code in Emacs to keep track of what I’d bought. I’ve used it for over a decade now, and it works fine, but it’s super duper basic:

It’s basically just a buffer that lists all the authors, and then if you click them, you get:

A list of all the books from that author, as well as the registered publication date.

So that’s fine, but:

The data quality from the various ISBN lookup providers is pretty bad. I mean, it’s not only the inconsistency, but it’s also sometimes altogether wrong, because ISBN reuse is a thing, unfortunately.

In addition, I’ve been buying ebooks too, and these are totally outside this system. Whenever I buy a papery physical book, I blitz it with the bar code scanner, and it’s registered — it takes me literally two seconds or less. With ebooks, I’ve got no system at all, and I’m buying via three different online stores, so my book shopping headache has reestablished itself.

So I hear what you’re saying: Just bite the bullet and use Librarything for everything. And I say: No! So there! stomps foot

Voila!

I spent one day tinkering with this thing, and now I can edit the data to satisfy my CDO (it’s like OCD, only the letters are in the proper alphabetical order), and I can add ebooks (manually-ish, sigh). When the data is easily available like this, the obvious errors (like with the author name above) can be fixed very quickly.

I added more support to the isbn.el library to do Goodreads queries, too. Goodreads doesn’t have an API any more, so I have to do some web scraping, which sucks, but this increased the number of book covers by 180%, since the services that do have an API aren’t as comprehensive. So whatchagonnado.

Covers are nice.

I also added a new command to just list all the books in one big buffer:

Because I realised that having a buffer with authors, and then books by specific authors is all well and fine, but it’s really just much faster to C-s for a book name than to first find the author, and then find the book. I mean, I’ve not got a million books; it’s just er:

That many.

Hey, now I can get data out of this thing by just clicking on the columns… Let’s see… I’ve got 432 unread books! Sure! I’ll get to them all one day.

(Actually, looking over that list, it looks like I’ve forgotten to mark a large number of books as read… uhm… I’m guesstimating about 100? I should revise the data one of these days.)

Anyway, the code is on Microsoft Github. I’m not sure anybody would find this usable as is, but perhaps there’s some useful bits. At least the isbn.el library in there is somewhat helpful.

Book Club 2025: 1222 by Anne Holt

Easter is mystery book time in Norway. It’s been speculated that it all started because people went off to do skiing in the mountains, and they needed some light reading for the evenings (or when they were snowed in), but I guess it’s just One Of Those Things: A thing happens randomly, and then it gets attention, and before you know it, it’s a national holiday.

But this is one of those sacred traditions I adhere to, so I’m reading mysteries this week.

This is an old book by Anne Holt, who was the minister of justice for like a couple of months a few decades back. (Or something.) This is a very appropriate book — it takes place at a snowed-in hotel in the mountains, and then a couple of priests are killed! Who could it be!

I like Holt’s books, but this is pretty annoying. The only way she drives the plot forward here and maintains tension is by having everybody be interrupted all the time. So someone will come up to the protagonist and say “I know who killed that priest! It’s… it’s… Oh I gotta go!” OK, there’s one other trick she uses: Vagueness. A guy will come up to her and go “You know that guy? Well, he and I… Oh, I gotta go!”

So it’s really, really bad, and I guessed who the killer was halfway through (there was really only one candidate), but still: It’s pretty entertaining? It’s corny as hell, but it’s fine.

1222 (2007) by Anne Holt (3.35 on Goodreads)

Everything Is Bad Now pt LVII: PG Tips

For years I’ve been looking for a good “standard” tea. You know, just something you can drink in the morning while you’re too tired to make any decisions, or brew tea properly.

But I’ve been doing all these various weird fancy teas, and I like them all. Mostly TGW, who has amusing teas like the Japanese one that yields only 15 kilos per year, but none of the trees are ever exposed directly to the sun, and stuff like that. And I’ve learned what “FTGFOP1” means! (Finest Tippy Golden Fsomething Orange Pekoe First Flush. (Oh, yeah, the second F stands for Flowery.))

But choosing one is too much work in the morning, and perhaps I don’t want a tea that has reads web site “grassy, fishy notes” first thing in the morning. I wasn’t successful in finding A Standard One until a year and a half ago, when I read that PG Tips was the most sold brand in the UK. I gave it a try, and…

It was great! Many of the “standard” cheap brands, like Yorkshire Gold and stuff, have a slightly unpleasant bitterness going on. Others, like Lipton, just taste awful all around. Twinings has several blends that are fine, but they’re all slightly annoying in one way or another — too weak, too strong, too bitter, too sweet, too whatever.

The flavour of PG Tips could be described very simple: It tasted like tea.

That’s it. It’s like the Platonic ideal of tea taste. It just tastes like tea. Not grasslike, not bitter, not sweet, not flowery. Just tea.

But I ran out of the stash I bought a year and a half ago, and yesterday I went to buy some more, and I got this huge sack. But then I came home and read at the back: “New PG Tips Original”!?

What!?

So I gave it a try this morning and… beurk.

I mean, it looks reasonable — it gives the water a tea-like colour. But the flavour is what you may call minimalist: It somehow makes the hot water taste essentially more like hot water.

I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here, but there’s just no flavour. It reminds me of when I had covid the first time — there’s a flavour void going on. (Hey, perhaps they can change the marketing to “Remember those halcyon days of Corona when you could stay home all day and nothing tasted of anything? PG Tips remembers”.)

Yes, I checked the back, and it’s not expired. Still, there might just be a production flaw for these big bags, so I googled:

I’ve been a PG drinker for 40+ years and these new bags are the death knoll of the brand IMO. The best description I can give them is bland/watery and uninviting. They’ve lost the brightness they used to have, its like they removed all the flavonoids and just left the tannins.

So it’s not just me. Apparently PG Tips was bought by Lipton, and then by some kind of venture capitalist, and now it tastes like nothing.

Heh:

My family loves PG Tips for an everyday, wake me up type tea, and I also enjoy it for milk teas, but we just got their latest version and it’s horrible! It has no flavor and even the color is weak! I tried using twice the tea bags and I still can’t get the strong flavor of the original.

If I’m reading the statistics right, PG Tips used to be the largest brand in the UK, but now:

I guess I’ll try the other standard brands… otherwise it’s back to drinking Japanese tea that has fishy, grassy notes. And this bag of PG Tips goes in the trash.

In conclusion: This is the worst thing that has even happened to humankind.