I got a Kindle Touch today for Christmas–thanks Kesa! Admittedly I’m pretty late to this party. As I made ready to purchase my first ebook I hopped over to my GoodReads to-read list, to pick something out. I scanned the list quickly, and my eye came to rest on Stephen Ramsey’s recent book Reading Machines. But I got hung up on something irrelevant: the subtitle was Toward and Algorithmic Criticism instead of Toward an Algorithmic Criticism, the latter of which is clearly correct based on the cover image.

Having recently looked at API services for book data I got curious about how the title appeared on other popular web properties, such as Amazon:

GoogleBooks:

Barnes & Noble:

and LibraryThing

I wasn’t terribly surprised not to find it on OpenLibrary. But it does seem interesting that the exact same typo is present on all these book websites as well, while the title appears correct on the publisher’s website:

and at OCLC:

It’s hard to tell for sure, but my guess is that Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and GoogleBooks got the error from Bowker Link (the Books in Print data service), and that LibraryThing then picked up the data from Amazon, and similarly GoodReads picked up the data from GoogleBooks. LibraryThing can pull data from a variety of sources, including Amazon; and I’m not entirely sure where GoodReads gets their data from, but it seems likely that it comes from the GoogleBooks API given other tie-ins with Google.

If you know more about the lineage of data in these services I would be interested to hear it. Specifically if you have a subscription to BowkerLink it would be great if you could check the title. It would be nice to live in a world where these sorts of data provenance issues were easier to read.