What is a good standard to share book data via a web service?

Question

I am managing a database filled by hundreds of publishers for both books and ebooks.

I would like to provide a free JSON or XML web-service to allow others sites (bookshops, library or whatever) or apps to access those data using an ISBN.

I made a first draft developing my own JSON standard :

{
    "cycle_id": null,
    "collection_id": "52",
    "publisher_id": "1166",
    "id": "40898",
    "url": "thomas-day/sept-secondes-pour-devenir-un-aigle",
    "title": "Sept secondes pour devenir un aigle",
    "cycle": "",
    "tome": "",
    "authors": "Thomas DAY",
    "collection": "LE BÉLIAL'",
    "number": null,
    "publisher": "LE BÉLIAL'",
    "price": "1900",
    "price_euro": 19,
    "cover": "http://media.biblys.fr/book/98/40898.jpg"
}

But is there a commonly used format that I should be using to do this?

Have a look at http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/LibraryThing_APIs — Dijkgraaf, Nov 11 '13 at 02:08

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 10 '13 at 21:02

I don't think there is a commonly used format for this, at least none that I could find. Even if some standard to represent book info would exist, it will either be too narrow to fill everybody's needs or will be to generic as to include any possible information you could store about a book. There is too much data variance as to be feasible to create an useful standard.

One thing I could suggest is to search for other web services that expose book searches and maybe borrow some ideas from there (e.g. from something like Google Books API or ISBNdb API).

So it's just a matter of representing the data you have in your system. Keep it simple and go with your own format.

Just my 2 cents!

What is a good standard to share book data via a web service?

1 Answers1