OpenLibrary is such an unfortunate case of semi-failure. It hasn't failed exactly (it's still around), and there's enough of a heartbeat that people can claim that it's going strong and there's nothing wrong (especially stakeholders closest to the chest who are least likely to stomach criticism). But its scope is both exactly what I want for a hypothetical book-related IMDB-like platform, and the same time it's not at all something that I use with any regularity that leaves me feeling that it has been helpful for the task at hand and thinking, "It's a good thing it exists."At this point, it's probably a bad thing that it exists, because if it didn't exist and you were trying to describe how you wish there was a good site that was like an IMDB for books that was editable like Wikipedia, then they couldn't say, "There is! It's called OpenLibrary", or dismiss your criticism by telling you that whatever is wrong with it you can help fix because it's both editable and the code is all open source.
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