This really is not my week. Chevy's gave me chicken in my nachos again when I ordered vegetarian nachos.

I'm guessing that some people think that "no meat" doesn't imply "no poultry".

I would absolutely love to see a vegetarian certification program in parallel with kashrut/halal certification. Come on, entrepreneurs! And then they could have "this restaurant prepares these dishes in appropriate vegetarian style". Which a kashrut mashciach won't certify, because kashrut doesn't believe that just washing something will purify it.

Maybe I should just learn to cook something other than pasta and rice.

That was just the latest in a series of small disasters which have befallen me all week.

In unrelated news, a friend and I actually thought of a <buzzword>B2B</buzzword> startup that would be profitable (no, really) -- but we don't want to start it or tell other people to start it because we think there are a lot of ethical problems. We should have some reporters write an article "San Francisco Bay Area Twentysomethings Refrain From Founding Internet Company" but just not tell the reporters what our idea actually was. :-)

Actually, we could try to get a business method patent on it and then use the patent in some ethical way. Hmmm. But I'd feel guilty just having a patent at all. The worst thing I've ever done with the USPTO was to apply for a trademark (and then I let the application lapse).

As I look at some of the domains that might describe that idea, it looks like some squatters have registered them; do they actually understand the concept?

... my friend already has his own Internet company anyway, and it's actually profitable, and he's following the "Ben and Jerry's model" with great success. So he's not hurting for Internet startups or anything.

I know that Ralph Nader spoke in Davis on Sunday. It's a long story. Maybe some people had a good time hearing him speak.

I was over in Berkeley again, trying and failing to go to a bookstore. We didn't make it to the Exploratorium.

I promise to send something to raph's bibref.org mailing list soon, like Python or shell code to get bibliographic records from the Library of Congress by ISBN. I'm trying to clean this up a little and do some trivial collection management stuff so that it's convenient to scan books and automatically build a catalog from them.

I could probably write something for my father (a bookdealer) so that he could at least do inventory control with barcodes, although probably 80% of his books don't have ISBNs, much less ISBN barcodes. So he would need to print some kind of bar code labels to affix to books without damaging them. But this could help because he does try to list books through Alibris. I always want to automate my father's business in new ways, but it always turns out to be more difficult than it might first appear.

What I should really do is go visit the national libraries of five or six countries and ask them if they would make bibliographic data from their collections freely available in a standardized format for the benefit of collectors and all sorts of other purposes. But I do have over 50 things on my todo list before that. :-)

Maybe somebody can buy R. R. Bowker (never mind that they're not a public company) and turn them into a non-profit. It should only take a billion dollars or so, right?

Oh, wait... we'd have to make an offer to Reed-Elsevier. Hmmm. How much would Reed-Elsevier cost? :-)

Maybe it's better to start slightly less ambitiously.

thom, books are published at a kind of breakneck pace, so it would be pretty hard for any library to keep up. I once heard that the Library of Congress had every book every published, but I think that claim is extremely out of date (perhaps at least a century out of date), since I have books which aren't in their catalog.

To buy every book published -- assuming one started with an up-to-date collection! -- would take at least a multimillion-dollar annual acquisitions budget. This is of course ignoring many other issues like search and transaction costs, cataloguing and indexing costs, and shelving and archiving and maintenance costs -- not to mention the construction costs needed to build the equivalent of several normal library buildings a year. Right?

I've never heard of a library with more than tens of millions of items in its inventory, but maybe...

Also, even Books in Print doesn't provide a complete list of everything published in a particular year. For one thing, there are still plenty of small publishers far outside the reach of the ISBN system. Like IP addresses, ISBNs now unfortunately cost money. But a book even today need not have an ISBN or bar code or CIP data or anything in order to be a book. (Granted that it will never be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble.) I have a religious tract printed just last year -- bound signatures, title, page numbers, author, copyright notice, table of contents, introduction, a preface, even an edition number. No ISBN, no CIP, no subject headings, no publisher. That's right, it was "privately printed".

I think this is a "book", but I bet the Bodleian doesn't have it, I bet no national libraries have it. What would it cost to track down a copy if the tract went "out of print" before it attracted any notice in any guide to printed works? Is this situation any better for libraries or collectors than publishing in the 1700s?