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Most kindle books don't have ISBN, just ASIN. Given a ISBN or ASIN, is it possible to get the list of all books by the same author (both paper and ebooks)? Does amazon have some kind of author ID, that uniquely identifies authors?

nyedidikeke
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4 Answers4

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Using the Amazon Product Advertising API, you can do an ItemLookup on ASIN first. This will give you author (as well as other things). You can then do an ItemSearch with "author" as parameter. This is textual -- afaik there is no author ID - the API only operates with names.

See the documentation for the API for more info.

Hirdesh Vishwdewa
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Arve
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Amazon has this concept of "entity pages." Every author has one (as do cars and probably lots of other stuff.) They're not just a text search, they're a bona fide relationship between products. For example:

http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-King/e/B000AQ0842
http://www.amazon.com/1998-Toyota-Tacoma/e/B004CGPSQY

These entities are themselves ASINs and it seems you can search for that ASIN and get all the products under that entity. E.g. this returns 365 products:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=B000AQ0842

That's not just books, that's mouse pads and t-shirt and everything else too. But the search API should let you limit by category.

Getting that entity ASIN though, not sure how to do that programmatically. If you look at an arbitrary Stephen King book and view source, that entity ASIN shows up in there. You could probably scrape for it.

jpsimons
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  • By the way those entity pages are hard to find. If you search books for "J. K. Rowling" you get a link for "Amazon's Complete Selection of...". Follow that and you'll see a link for "Read more at Amazon's ... Page." That one's the entity page. – jpsimons Feb 14 '11 at 01:08
  • yup, trying to see if I can programatically find them somehow. Didn't know these pages exist, thank you for telling me. –  Feb 14 '11 at 01:10
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Depends on how you want this to work. A quick search brought me to http://isbndb.com/data-intro.html You could to a search for the ISBN and get the result. That result contains the author's name that you can run a second search on to return your list.

Justin808
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  • We can do this Amazon's API too. But it will return books of authors with similar author names. Which means, I'd get books that were not necessarily written by the same author. Also, your method wouldn't work for kindle books, because not all kindle books have ISBNs. –  Feb 14 '11 at 00:10
  • @user187809 - You can add quotes around the name to get an exact match. (https://isbndb.com/search-all.html?kw=Joanne+Rowling) returns a result, (https://isbndb.com/search-all.html?kw="Joanne+Rowling") does not. As for ASIN, your question said either ISBN or ASIN. – Justin808 Feb 14 '11 at 00:24
  • Fair enough. I modified the question. But I still won't be able to get "Kindle only" books. –  Feb 14 '11 at 00:28
  • I've never used AWS, but the idea should still hold true. Search by ASIN, get the results which contains the author, search for the author. I would assume that Amazon allows for quoted/exact searches as well. – Justin808 Feb 14 '11 at 00:38
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Use Open Library. You can search by ISBN and ASIN, and get an author ID, then search by author. There are also fewer restrictions on your use of the data.

Terence Johnson
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