The Goldfish Chronicles

Bugger. Just spent a while looking into the amazon web service as an easy way to get a book database [ie I have the isbn’s, I want the name of the book].

All looks good, except that by turning the isbn into the name of the book, I have to link each name to Amazon and may not link to competiton such as Bookpool or JavaShelf [though JavaShelf lack an ISBN based URL].

Takes me back to working in a bookshop when I was 16 in the UK. They had a subscription [not cheap I think] for micro-fiche containing a list of all currently published books in the UK. I think Bertrams were the company who shipped it.

Shame that that kind of information is still locked away. I guess I need to decide between a little typing and enhancing Amazon’s sales to save a little bit of effort and do it ‘properly’.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2004 at 9:46 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.