Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
A successful archival of one of those ISBNs will light up; four of those ISBNs remain dark. Yet they have that content archived. It means that lighting up the entire grid is not necessary to achieve their goal.
Indeed a bigger problem is that it’s much harder to know which areas of the grid are never going to light up because the ISBN has not been used.
Lighting up the entire grid is still the goal, you're describing the problem of ensuring the right set of squares is illuminated for each piece of archived content. One is a problem of archiving the content, the other is a problem of bookkeeping.
>Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
Hardly worthless... often times, the edition of the book matters as much as the title. Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other. He pulled a Lucas pretty early on.
He's hardly the only author to ever do this. But it's not just authors either. Editors, collectors, translators all make their mark, and give you works that though they might be slightly different to you, the differences actually matter to the rest of us. It's not that you're ignorant that offends me, it's the arrogance about a subject you seem to know so little about that makes it difficult to tolerate.
There is no pedantry here, just a desire to actually preserve books and to organize them.
> Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other
Then those two texts would map to different ISBNS, or perhaps each maps to multiple different ISBNs, it doesn't matter. That some texts exist with the same title but different content is similarly irrelevant.
The content is all that matters. Two different bodies of content, two different entries in the archive. Each entry may map to one or more ISBN numbers.
> the differences actually matter to the rest of us
The only differences that matter are what matters to the archive that made the blog post. Your concerns are for entirely different things, which is fine, but don't say the OP's concerns or initiatives are impossible or ill-suited based on a criteria you're projecting onto them.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry