What is the most complete (free) ISBN API?
If anyone is still interested, I just ran a couple of experiments with the same test set (which incidentally includes 105 ISBN codes, not 101 as mentioned in the question) and got the following results:
- Google Book Search API: 95 (apparently it's improving)
- Open Library Books API: 55 (same as before..)
- ISBNdb: 60
- Amazon API: 74
Whadaya know.. Google wins again :oSource: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1297700/what-is-the-most-complete-free-isbn-api
PS. Of the 10 books Google missed, only one was found by Amazon, so I'm getting a feeling that using a combination of two or more APIs won't bring too much..
My Tests
I ran a couple of tests on Google and Amazon to see which performed better under my watch.
I ran a simple query against the Google Book's API to find a book using an ISBN number and to my surprise I was bombarded with a mass of results which apparently matched the query; not so helpful... I might need to look into this.
Amazon
This time, I ran a simple search using the form on Amazon's UK site using the same ISBN number and just two results were returned, the paperback version and the eBook; these results would be much easier to filter programmatically for my purpose than Googles'.
What now?
Well, I decided to seek more information about Amazon and see whether I could find a place to register for a developer API which would suit my purpose; this turned out to be more difficult that I thought... After some time, Wikipedia supplied me with the answer.
From the list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services) it seems that the API I need to register for is titled 'Amazon Product Advertising API'.
Amazon's Product Advertising API, formerly Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S) and before that known as Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), is a web service and application programming interface (API) that gives application programmers access to Amazon's product catalog data.Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Product_Advertising_API
I found the Amazon Product Advertising API registration form through Google and proceeded to register, however I paid close attention to their Terms and Conditions after reading something at Stackoverflow. Amazon state that the main purpose of their API is to generate sales; I tweaked my app's description a little to lend it in this direction. See below figure.
However, now that that's all out of the way, I must test Amazon's Product Advertising API to make sure it's suitable; more about that in the following post.