--- title: The Perils of ISBN | daily.dev description: Building a Letterboxd-style book tracking app turns out to be surprisingly hard due to the ISBN problem. Unlike movies, books have dozens of ISBNs per title... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-perils-of-isbn-e6iwzdcgu twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Perils of ISBN | daily.dev og:description: Building a Letterboxd-style book tracking app turns out to be surprisingly hard due to the ISBN problem. Unlike movies, books have dozens of ISBNs per title... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-perils-of-isbn-e6iwzdcgu og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/E6iWzDcgu.png og:image:alt: The Perils of ISBN og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Perils of ISBN **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 6 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Building a Letterboxd-style book tracking app turns out to be surprisingly hard due to the ISBN problem. Unlike movies, books have dozens of ISBNs per title (one per edition, format, and printing), making search results messy and unusable for casual logging. The FRBR model used by librarians distinguishes between works, expressions, manifestations, and items — but most public APIs like Google Books return low-level edition data rather than canonical works. OpenLibrary is the closest open alternative but has data quality issues and 40+ million entries with duplicates. No clean, open, high-quality book database analogous to The Movie Database exists, making the project significantly harder than building a movie tracker. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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