In-Progress (e)book scraper suggestion

[xbmcgotham 35]

Hi, I like to suggest 2 possible capers for (e)books. As it is currently not yet implemented and manually adding all the book information is to much work.

 

The firsts caper is from ISBNplus.com. It has an API and its free. All you need to start downloading. I tested it with a few books I have and it showed all info on it, including book cover picture. 

 

http://www.isbnplus.com/api/

 

 

The second options or extra scraper can be Worldcat:

 

 (https://opendata.sta...nglish-books-ha)

 

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After doing some research and testing its search features today, I found the Worldcat database to be the best candidate for multi-language ISBN search. It has more in that it also has other media, such as DVD's and audio CD's, but for books it gets correct results every time, even for 1980 books not printed anymore. All media included, they say its database contains more than 2 billion items.

 

 

What is the most comprehensive resource for querying french and english books having an ISBN code?

I would like to know if a repository of all known ISBN exists; either a worldwide database, or per country. 

If there is no such downloadable database, among all the available API's for querying books by ISBN codes (think Google Books, Amazon, etc.), what is objectively the most complete resource that would allow me to query books in English AND French languages ?

A quick Google search turns up several APIs.

• Google Books
• Amazon
• LibraryThing
• half.com
• isbndb.com
• Goodreads
• Bookfinder
• Open Library
• WorldCat API

You can limit your queries to these resources by knowing that French ISBNs start with a 2 and English ISBN's start with a 0 or 1.

Edit

As far as getting ISBNs for older books

I would assume this goes for any books that existed before ISBN was in wide use. ISBN became a standard in 1970 but in France, ISBN codes have been mandatory only since the 3rd December of 1981 (link is in French).

Reprints of older books will be assigned ISBNs by the publisher. That is why books in the public domain (like most 'classics': Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc.) are issued by different publishers and have different ISBNs. - Source

It has also books in many languages including English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc.

Worldcat seems to be owned by the OCLC, an organism I didn't know existed, and which is according to Wikipedia:

"a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs".

It is also indicated that they (emphasis is mine):

produce and maintain WorldCat, 

the largest online public access catalog

 (OPAC) in the world.

... which by the way falls I think into the Open Data SE website.

Take a look at this tool https://github.com/xlcnd/isbntools. From the command line you can enter commands like this isbn_meta 978032153496 and get metadata about books from WorldCatalogue, Google Books, isbndb.com, OpenLibrary, ... and it is very easy to build more providers with a few lines of python!

You can access ISBN ranges (isbn_mask ISBN) and editions isbn_editions ISBN and with this info query more specific databases.

[Luke 42077]

Great suggestions for metadata fetchers. Thanks !

[xbmcgotham 35]

Thanks

[Luke 42077]

There is now an OpenLibrary plugin in the Emby Plugin catalog for books, and it supports ISBN lookup.

Please try it out and report your experience. Thanks !

[Luke 42077]

An update to the Emby Open Library plugin has gone out to support lookups using either ISBN or the Open Library Work Id. The Work Id should help make matching easier, although you can still lookup using ISBN. Here is clarification on the differences between Open Library works and editions:

https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/editing#work-edition