Glitches in collecting book data based on ISBNs
November 11, 2009 by sankarshan · 7 Comments
Over the weekend I snagged a somewhat cheap and, easily available hand-held barcode scanner – an iBall LS-162. Fairly nifty device and, works plug-n-play on Fedora.
The reason behind this was to finally collect and collate information about all the books that is stashed around me and, create a nice list based on the ISBN data. Which is here I ran into a glitch I did not anticipate. A number of the technical books which I buy (yes, in spite of the Safari, ACM and IEEE subscriptions, sometimes I do buy books) are Indian reprints and, using the ISBN to look-up the metadata isn’t working out as planned.
Does anyone have a pointer to what I should be looking the data up against ? Additionally, does anyone know of a small tool which can take in a list of ISBN numbers and, pull down the metadata for the books to output to a CSV ? I tried traditional tools like Alexandria, it did not work out. If you want a sample list of the ISBNs, leave a comment on this entry and, I’ll point you to a download link or send it over email.
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sankarshan blogs about stuff that interests him and sometimes the same things interest others too. All that is just an excuse by him to start a conversation
Try http://isbndb.com/
This generally works for my Indian LPEs.
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sankarshan Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
@Susmit – thank you. Will look into this. Or, since Kushal was looking for this, would point him to the resource.
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I would try looking up the books on amazon.
Amazon released a php library to access their api at
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/642.html
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sankarshan Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
@Micheas – thank you for dropping by. I’ll check up the resource.
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I use http://librarything.com/ as a great way to both look up and keep track of books by isbn.
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I’ve tried searching the Amazon catalogue with a couple of Indian reprint books and it worked well for me. I cooked up a small script back then using the tarzan library. You can give that a try: http://tarzan-aws.com/
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