Hi friends,

I was just speaking to Asaf @ WMF about the road to pairing Wikipedia book articles to copies which are freely available and readable through the Internet Archive's Open Library.

Open Library has ~16M works and ~25M editions, about 1.8M of these editions are readable without any login. An additional several hundred thousand modern works are borrowable with an archive.org account.

I recognize that there are already tens of thousands of books on Wikidata (maybe more, now!) which have Open Library IDs (olids) -- e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P648. Asaf and I wondered whether a good first step might be to see how many of the readable works Open Library has are already on Wikidata.

TL;DR -- The Open Library team would love to help empower more wikipedia and wikidata users to access readable copies of books related to the content they're viewing. And we'd love to explore donating metadata to help improve the quality of Wikidata. What are the community's feelings on this, what existing efforts may exist (or have existed) which I should be aware of, and how do you recommend we proceed in a way which respects the community's policies and goals?

best wishes,

- mek

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