Books-by-isbn

http://www.books-by-isbn.com


Where does this site get its data?

This site collects data on books and other media collected from a number of web services that send XML data which this site processes further. At present these are: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.ca and amazon.fr, also isbndb.com (as the number of data requests per day that isbndb.com can serve its users today is limited, my site queries isbndb.com only as a last resort, when the Amazon sites have no data.) A further data source is the data from on prefix ranges issued by the International ISBN Agency (isbn-international.org) - my algorithm uses this display the ISBN properly segmented with dashes into country, publisher, book and check digit parts, which is information that the above mentioned web services do not deliver.


What is the use of this site, then?

The utility of this site is in collating the information from the above mentioned sites. The various Amazon sites only have information on the books sold in the relevant locale (many books are sold only in a subset of locales for commercial, licensing, legal etc. reasons). isbndb.com, on the other hand, only has information culled from the catalogs of libraries, which limits the information available on recent or forthcoming issues as well as books from non-English language publishers. Also this sites cross-references books published by the same author even when the various books cannot be found on the same site.