about
This is a new bibliography. I hope everyone ejoys it. It's meant to be somewhat interactive, and it will be more successful the more people submit reviews and feedback. If you've read a book and have an opinion, please click the review button at the bottom of that book's page.
The new search feature is something that I hope people will find useful, making it easier to get to the titles you want quickly.
You might notice that the images of the books are not all the same size. I have made some effort to try to keep them to scale with each other. In other words, the images of The Go Player's Almanac are much bigger than Test Your Go Strength because it is physically that much bigger.
help
The simple search that appears at the bottom of the index page is exactly the same as the one at the bottom of the search page. It searches for the entered string across all the fields in all the books in the database. It is not case sensitive, which means that entering Ishi will return the exact same results as entering ishi. There is no need for wildcard characters as it simply attempts to match the entered string over any point. So entering Ishi will return a match for all books authored by Yoshio Ishida, for all books published by Ishi press, Punishing and Correcting Joseki Mistakes, as well as others in all likelyhood.
The advanced search on the search page is a deal more complicated. You can enter a string in the same way as the simple search, choose any number of fields to search for that string in, decide whether the search needs to match all the entered words or any of the entered words. I am sure there are ways I can improve this search, so if there is a method of searching you'd like to be able to perform but can't given this present system, please let me know. This function is presently disabled, as I am trying to sort out how best to create an interface to the CGI that will be simple and intuitive, and still allow users to easily create any search imaginable. This will be resolved for the full release.
short term future plans
A feature that will be implemented shortly will be the addition of sample pages to book webpages, when available.
I will add the books I have noticed are missing from the database.
It would be great to track down all the sgf files of the games in each book, where possible, and host them. I shall begin to do this.
A feature that will be implemented shortly will be a log of internet sales of out of print books. This will include information such as date, time, final cost, condition reports and images, if possible. I hope that this will help collectors get an idea of how often these out of print titles are sold on the internet, what sort of condition they're in, and what sort of price they go for when they do appear.
I need to create a webpage for each individual series of books, e.g. one page that collects the entire "Learn to Play Go Series" by Janice Kim.
I will create an author's page, with a short bio of each book's author. The authors name in the details section of each book will hotlink directly to their entry in this page.
I need to create a low bandwidth version of the website
long term future plans
I believe that implementing cookies on this site might be worthwhile, just to allow client browsers to remember changes to the look and feel set for presentation of books, and perhaps other nice things.
Longer term it might be nice to start an account system, so that people don't have to continually fill in their details everytime they submit feedback or a review.
Additional uses of cookies and accounts could allow users to configure a primary reviewer, ensuring that all books with reviews by any primary reviewers always get presented at the top of the list of reviews, perhaps the maximum number of reveiws presented on a single page, and many other things.
Allowing users to keep a catalogue of books they own would also be a nice idea. These all rely on either cookies or accounts or both.
Encouraging participation is important (very important, but not vital). I could also reward users who have submitted a reasonable number of reviews with a subdomain and email forwarder. The subdomain (username.gobooks.nemir.org) could be configured so that user's reviews are always presented as the first review of any book.
It would be fantastic to expand this site to include books in languages other than english. To make this a reality would require assistance from many people, so I am not sure how practical it would be. At the very least I can make a beginning, and hope that once some books in spanish, chinese, korean, japanese, etc. are in the database people are inspired to submit more.
pipe dreams
I would love to get (periodic?) interviews with publishers and authors.
It would be great to get regular updates about upcoming plans from the various publishers.
As always, it would be great to hear any ideas you have for this site. Just use the feedback form.