Weirdness on Amazon

by Liberty and Power

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

There’s a book of mine titled The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann that’s listed on Amazon, Google Books, and Worldcat.

I know it’s a book because Worldcat says so. But it’s really an 11-page paper I wrote for a course in college back in 1983. (Google Books calls it “22 pages,” but that’s because they’re counting the blank back sides.) So how did it get listed in these various venues?

Initially I saw only the Amazon listing, and was mightily puzzled; but I eventually figured it out. (I would have figured it out sooner if I’d seen the Worldcat listing.) This paper (a fictional dramatisation of the implications of Boltzmann’s views on probability) was submitted by my professor (astrophysicist David Layzer) to an undergraduate essay contest called the James Bryant Conant Competition in Natural Science that year; it won, which I’m guessing caused a bound copy of it to be shelved in the Harvard library archives, which in turn caused it to be listed as a book in various databases. But it’s just an undergraduate paper, and it’s never been available for sale anywhere. Weird.

If I come across my copy (no doubt buried in a box somewhere) I’ll post the thing.

In vaguely related news, I also stumbled across the existence of an I Love Roderick Long t-shirt. I am not responsible for this and have no idea who is! Double weird.

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Andrew D. Todd - 2/15/2008

Amazon Marketplace used to be called Bibliofind-- it used to be an independent company. About ten years ago, I was lobbying them to integrate Library of Congress data (now called WorldCat), as a means of standardizing their cataloging. Small used booksellers are not the most methodical of people, and they are apt to be slapdash about creating listings. Hence the advantage of creating a system which allows people to simply type in the ISBN number and get a full, correct listing.

The Library of Congress catalog has recently (2006) absorbed the National Union Catalog, a catalog of rare books held at various other libraries. Again, it's a matter of unifying databases to make them easier to use. A library's working definition of a book is something which has a call number and a binding, which includes pamphlets. From their point of view, a prize paper is simply an unusually short thesis, and is handled in the usual way for such things.

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Stephan Kinsella - 2/15/2008

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/105-9105603-7990824?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=N.%20Stephan%20Kinsella
They have for years now listed as one of my "books" a law review article I wrote in 1994, "A Civil Law To Common Law Dictionary." (http://www.kinsellalaw.com/publications/kinsella_civil-common-law-dictionary.pdf) Bizarre.

Aeon J. Skoble - 2/14/2008

I meant the shirt, but it's also very cool that your undergrad work is getting a second life. My undergrad work is probably best left undisturbed.

Aeon J. Skoble - 2/14/2008

That. Is. Awesome.