ISBN Lookup

[NovaScotian]

I have a large list of book titles & authors, but not their ISBN codes. Does anyone know of a web-based DB where I might automate looking them up, preferably with a script and curl?

[NaOH]

I can't speak to scripts and curl, but have a look at www.lookupbyisbn.com. From another angle, maybe using the trial version of Delicious Library will be enough for your needs. Once books are entered into the application using an iSight camera, the software can export to delimited text, XML, and Excel, among others.

[NovaScotian]

That works, NaOH, Thanks. As for Delicious Library (which I have), I don't have these books any more so I can't scan them. These are from an old list of books read that I'd like to add to Goodreads.com so all I have is author's name and title. I used to use software simply called "Books" which looked up ISBN for you, but the author stopped supporting it when an OS X upgrade broke it and the ISBN lookup stopped working. He was going to replace it with a new app called "Codex", but seems to have stopped developing that as well back in 2010

[tommaso]

Might you also be able to use an online book seller to search for a particular title, edition, etc., then use the listed ISBN or ASN?

[NovaScotian]

Good idea -- hadn't thought of that. Even Amazon might have them and I could parse their HTML to extract the ISBN.

[tommaso]

That's what I did with my Booxter entries that I didn't have ISBNs for, and it provides remarkably satisfactory results.

[hayne]

Probably easier to use Amazon's API for searching for books:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com...tail/main.html
I think you have to sign up but I think it's free. And I think there likely are limits on the frequency with which you can query their databases.

[NovaScotian]

Thanks, Hayne.