On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 5:04 AM, Stefan Wurzinger <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I'm new to Open Library and I want to ask if there is a Java source
> code available to implement a tool which allows to download books from
> the Open Library platform.
>

I don't believe there's a specific Java client library for OpenLibrary.
 It's pretty simple though.  As Karen pointed out, it's basically just a
matter of constructing the right URLs and parsing the JSON which is
returned.  Here's a simple example I found in Google (although it's doing
other stuff with the results):
http://www.nuxeo.com/blog/development/2013/02/qa-friday-external-web-service-call-included-automation-chain/
As
you can see it's just a few lines of code to get the basic results.

As Karen mentioned, OpenLibrary only stores metadata, not text.  You'll
need to get the text from Internet Archive in your desired format.  If you
were starting with, for example, authors, you'd want to follow the chain
Author->Works->Editions->Text and filter to only include editions which
contain Internet Archives identifiers.  Alternatively, you could just use
the search API to search directly for subjects, etc.  If you're using the
search API, has_fulltext=true is a good way to achieve that filtering.

Here's a sequence of URLs showing the progression from the search API
through to Internet Archive:

http://openlibrary.org/search?q=volleyball&has_fulltext=true
http://openlibrary.org/books/ia:passsetcrushvoll00luca/Pass_set_crush_volleyball_illustrated
http://openlibrary.org/books/ia:passsetcrushvoll00luca.json
http://archive.org/details/passsetcrushvoll00luca (using value of key
"ocaid" from JSON result above)
http://www.archive.org/download/passsetcrushvoll00luca/ (switching to the
download directory from the HTML view - this will redirect to actual
storage location)

where you can see (what would be) the available download formats.
 Available formats include raw OCR XML, PDF, text, DejaVu XML, etc.  In
this particular case, the book is in copyright, so you can't download them.
 This points out another thing that you'll need to deal with which I don't
know the solution to off the top of my head.  The ebooks/fulltext search
will also return hits on DAISY format books for blind people which are only
readable on specially registered devices.  I don't know off the top of my
head how to filter them out.

Hope that helps.  Feel free to ask followup questions if you get stuck.

Tom
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