Mapping Every Book Ever Published
January 14, 2026
One of our writers just found this super cool project from Anna’s Archive that’s basically trying to map all the books in the world using ISBN numbers (those little codes every book gets). They made a neat image that’s just 1000×800 pixels — but each pixel actually stands for 2,500 ISBNs! Green means they’ve got a backup copy of the book, red means they know the book exists but don’t have a copy yet.
Here’s the crazy part: that tiny image sums up the biggest fully open list of books ever put together — hundreds of gigabytes of data compressed into something that fits in less than 300kb.
The not-so-great news? They’ve only backed up about 16% of all those books so far. Lots more to do!
Why ISBNs? Because since the 1970s, almost every book published has had one — so it’s the perfect way to make a giant to-do list of what to save.
But there’s no single place that keeps track of all ISBNs since they’re assigned by countries, publishers, and so on. So Anna’s Archive has spent a couple of years scraping tons of sources like Google Books, Worldcat, Goodreads, and more to build the biggest open collection of book data in the world.
Now they’re challenging the community to make this visualization even better — with a $10,000 prize pool!
The goal is to make the picture zoomable, clickable, and interactive, showing book details and publisher info. Plus, there’s room to get creative with colors, layouts, and even spotting rare books that need saving.
If you’re into data, books, or just cool projects, this is definitely one to watch. It’s a huge step toward preserving the world’s knowledge before it disappears.
