joey said:
>    I don't think a wiki entry per book is
>   a very elegant or scalable way to approach this.

again, i suggested a wiki for _coordination_,
not for cataloging per se.  there's a whole
lot of coordination that needs to be done
before you can even begin the cataloging.

but having said that, i would agree with joey
that it wouldn't be elegant or scalable to have
a wiki-page for each book, and i don't think
anyone would even suggest that for "a catalog".

(you might want to have a separate wiki-page
for each book for _discussion_ about that book,
but that would be an entirely different animal.)

i'd suggest a wiki-page for each "big category"
-- e.g., reference, fiction, nonfiction, serials --
with a list of e-book numbers and titles in each.

when a page gets too big, split it into sub-pages
depending on what kind of split of it makes sense.
(that's assuming that a split _does_ make sense.)

but again, much of the thought-work on this has
already been done previously on this very listserve,
so someone should first recover all of that work
instead of doing it all over again from scratch...

further, it should be possible to leverage some of
the work that greg just did in creating the d.v.d.

for instance, i draw your attention to the files here:
>   http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/gbn/pgimages/amazon/

there are amazon pages for the penguin classics library;
one list is sorted by title, the other list is sorted by author.
although the book-links on these copied pages don't work,
if you go to the current amazon pages, the links will work.

those individual-book pages could be quite useful to you.
for instance, the one for "around the world in 80 days" has:

>   Subjects
>   > Literature & Fiction > General > Classics
>   > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > British > 19th Century
>   > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > French
>  
>   Look for similar items by subject Classics
>   Fiction
>   French Novel And Short Story
>   Literature - Classics / Criticism
>   Literature: Classics
>   Voyages around the world
>   19th century fiction
>   Classic fiction
>   Fiction / Classics
>   French

if you were to scrape the amazon page for every e-text that p.g. has,
you'd end up with a lot of information to help you create a catalog...

perhaps the first thing you need to do is make a skeleton of exactly
how you want your catalog to look, and how you want it to behave...

-bowerbird