It shows what they want to show, which is mostly how much of the world books they have. Hierarchical has nothing to do with it.
The vast, vast majority have only been released as dead-tree versions. They have none of those. The books they scan may have an ISBN, but the scans do not have them. Like all Project Gutenberg books, their books have no ISBNs at all. From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
Indeed a bigger problem is that it’s much harder to know which areas of the grid are never going to light up because the ISBN has not been used.
Lighting up the entire grid is still the goal, you're describing the problem of ensuring the right set of squares is illuminated for each piece of archived content. One is a problem of archiving the content, the other is a problem of bookkeeping.
Hardly worthless... often times, the edition of the book matters as much as the title. Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other. He pulled a Lucas pretty early on.
He's hardly the only author to ever do this. But it's not just authors either. Editors, collectors, translators all make their mark, and give you works that though they might be slightly different to you, the differences actually matter to the rest of us. It's not that you're ignorant that offends me, it's the arrogance about a subject you seem to know so little about that makes it difficult to tolerate.
There is no pedantry here, just a desire to actually preserve books and to organize them.
Then those two texts would map to different ISBNS, or perhaps each maps to multiple different ISBNs, it doesn't matter. That some texts exist with the same title but different content is similarly irrelevant.
The content is all that matters. Two different bodies of content, two different entries in the archive. Each entry may map to one or more ISBN numbers.
> the differences actually matter to the rest of us
The only differences that matter are what matters to the archive that made the blog post. Your concerns are for entirely different things, which is fine, but don't say the OP's concerns or initiatives are impossible or ill-suited based on a criteria you're projecting onto them.
Are you saying they actively remove ISBN numbers from scans? If I downloaded one of the books, it wouldn't have an ISBN?
Why? That seems like a bunch of extra processing per book, makes it harder for users to specifically identify a book, and probably does nothing for legality. Also, can people search by ISBN?
No, he‘s playing the pointless „well, actually a scan of a book is a different thing from the book itself“ game.
> From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
And this is clearly a semantically worthless distinction from the point of view of the archive.
When different editions have different content, archiving those differences in that content may matter (arguably not for simple typographical corrections, printing errors, etc). When different ISBNs have identical content, it is totally irrelevant to the goals of the archive.
> Until now, the only options to shrink the total size of our collection has been through more aggressive compression, or deduplication. However, to get significant enough savings, both are too lossy for our taste. Heavy compression of photos can make text barely readable. And deduplication requires high confidence of books being exactly the same, which is often too inaccurate, especially if the contents are the same but the scans are made on different occasions.