On 6/27/05, Richard Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 2) The "generally" means that some books have multiple editions with > multiple ISBNs. So, in some cases, a book will have different ISBNs > in different countries. Other than doing string matching on the > title, and authors, I'm not sure how to map international editions of > the same book down to each other (or whether that's even desirable). > The key point though is that only some of the Amazons > (.co.uk, .com, .fr, etc) will sell a particular book with a > particular ASIN, so you can't do the obvious thing of just rewriting > the link to the user's local Amazon and hoping the book will exist. > Furthermore, much as they'd like to, they don't sell every book in > the world. If you discover an obscure ISBN from some other source, > you'll just get a (prettily formatted) 404 if you link it to Amazon > and they don't have it. >
OCLC's xisbn service is pretty good at this. It's not perfect, because A->B doesn't imply B->A, but it's a lot better than title matching. :) http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/xisbn/default.htm Their example: http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/0441172717 (0441172717 is the ISBN for Dune, by Frank Herbert.) Returns: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <idlist> <isbn>0441172717</isbn> <isbn>2724212649</isbn> <isbn>8473863402</isbn> <isbn>1556909330</isbn> <isbn>057501864x</isbn> <isbn>5867400115</isbn> <isbn>5860470126</isbn> <isbn>0194242390</isbn> <isbn>0425054713</isbn> <isbn>9029011149</isbn> <isbn>5237030777</isbn> <isbn>849759682x</isbn> <isbn>0425080021</isbn> <isbn>8470021818</isbn> <isbn>8484504085</isbn> <isbn>1402523602</isbn> <isbn>9632117670</isbn> <isbn>0801950775</isbn> <isbn>0450011844</isbn> <isbn>0425036987</isbn> <isbn>8371502117</isbn> <isbn>0575068566</isbn> <isbn>2266008560</isbn> <isbn>0441010628</isbn> <isbn>9029002573</isbn> <isbn>0425046877</isbn> <isbn>226602664x</isbn> <isbn>8485752600</isbn> <isbn>5170103565</isbn> <isbn>968320340x</isbn> <isbn>9739144675</isbn> <isbn>8385432167</isbn> <isbn>1559948981</isbn> <isbn>0399128964</isbn> <isbn>044100590x</isbn> <isbn>2266026658</isbn> <isbn>9739144667</isbn> <isbn>5700100371</isbn> <isbn>0736689591</isbn> <isbn>9632117662</isbn> <isbn>0425027066</isbn> <isbn>0575035404</isbn> <isbn>9739144683</isbn> <isbn>0736692401</isbn> <isbn>2266008552</isbn> <isbn>8320707722</isbn> <isbn>9749114701</isbn> <isbn>042507160x</isbn> <isbn>1402523807</isbn> <isbn>8741847040</isbn> <isbn>0575073349</isbn> <isbn>9158206078</isbn> <isbn>8401469317</isbn> <isbn>837298106x</isbn> <isbn>042505313x</isbn> <isbn>0736693688</isbn> <isbn>9158200258</isbn> <isbn>0441172660</isbn> <isbn>3453020928</isbn> </idlist> _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
