phiresky’s blog – “Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do – collect and share as many books as possible. One shadow library, Anna’s Archive (which I will not link here directly due to copyright concerns), recently posed a question: How could we effectively visualize 100,000,000 books or more at once? There’s lots of data to view: Titles, authors, which countries the books come from, which publishers, how old they are, how many libraries hold them, whether they are available digitally, etc. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) are 13-digit numbers that are assigned to almost all published books. Since the first three digits are fixed (currently only 978- and 979-) and the last digit is a checksum, this means the total ISBN13-Space only has two billion slots. Here is my interactive visualization of that space:

• Click here to view the visualization in full screen (esp. on mobile).