Ottobib
OttoBib.com was started as a hobby project in 2006 by Jonathan Otto, a then 4th year undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, USA.Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OttoBib.com
Ottobib seems to set out to address similar problems that my solution will, but it only has 1000 Facebook likes since its inception, which, according to Wikipedia, was in 2006. It's functional, however isn't particularly interesting to use.
The author of Ottobib states:
The idea for this site came from Seth Godin's blog post about "Stuck Systems".Source: http://www.ottobib.com/about
Seth outlined 2 requirements:
1. A bibliography based on looking up the data online.
2. Webpage that would allow the reader/teacher to see the books, their covers, links to Amazon or other online references.
I sought out this article and found that it didn't just outline the problem I set out to address with complete accuracy, but it was written six years ago!
Stuck Systems
A young friend of mine needed to create a bibliography for a school project this weekend.Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/stuck_systems.html
I had forgotten how annoying this task was. I was also pretty sure it was obsolete.
...
If your goal as a reader (or someone checking for plagiarism or quality of research) is to get to the books that the writer used, you need exactly one piece of data: the ISBN.
A quick online search didn't turn up what seemed obvious to me: a free service that would allow a writer to type in all the ISBNs used in creating a paper and then generate...
OttoBib uses WorldCat for its data. WorldCat actually returns results in bibliographic form so that no programmatic building is necessary. I jumped at this initially, it would save a huge amount of time, but WorldCat only provide a non-commercial API; this could work for starters, but it isn't great for future flexibility.
I believe that the added work will outweigh WorldCat's benefits, so I will continue to use the Google Books API; it seems that WorldCat are doing the same to boulster their data, anyway!
Bill Carney, Content Manager, WorldCatSource: http://code.google.com/apis/books/casestudies/worldcat.html
"The Google Book Search APIs represent an important advance in accessing the content scanned on behalf of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project. Working together enables us to increase the presence of these libraries and their collections on the Web."