If the author sees this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 might be relevant as it relates to catalogue completeness. OpenLibrary is very good, but Anna's Archive is potentially more complete.

The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a better summary of the issue.

tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number, within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very much matters.

I'm not sure we always want 'works'. Sometimes different 'expressions' of the same work are different enough that they don't have the same value.

For example, compare the most recent edition of 'Straight and crooked thinking' with the one published in 1930.

WASM is increasingly becoming the 'standard escape hatch' for web performance. It’s fascinating to see it move from niche graphics applications to everyday utility tools where zero-latency is the primary goal.

This also fails to take into account that ISBNs also contain the publisher ID in them. So identical copies of a book could have different ISBNs depending on which markets they are sold in.

I read that it's much worse than that, and there are ISBNs that were reused for completely different books.