How can I lookup data about a book from its barcode number? [closed]

Solution 1:

There's a very straightforward web based solution over at ISBNDB.com that you may want to look at.

Edit: Updated API documentation link, now there's version 2 available as well

Link to prices and tiers here

You can be up and running in just a few minutes (these examples are from API v1):

register on the site and get a key to use the API
try a URL like:

http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key={yourkey}&index1=isbn&results=details&value1=9780143038092

The results=details gets additional details including the card catalog number.

As an aside, generally the barcode is the isbn in either isbn10 or isbn13. You just have to delete the last 5 numbers if you are using a scanner and you pick up 18 numbers.

Here's a sample response:

<ISBNdb server_time="2008-09-21T00:08:57Z">
  <BookList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
    <BookData book_id="the_joy_luck_club_a12" isbn="0143038095">
      <Title>The Joy Luck Club</Title>
      <TitleLong/>
      <AuthorsText>Amy Tan, </AuthorsText>
      <PublisherText publisher_id="penguin_non_classics">Penguin (Non-Classics)</PublisherText>
      <Details dewey_decimal="813.54" physical_description_text="288 pages" language="" edition_info="Paperback; 2006-09-21" dewey_decimal_normalized="813.54" lcc_number="" change_time="2006-12-11T06:26:55Z" price_time="2008-09-20T23:51:33Z"/>
    </BookData>
  </BookList>
</ISBNdb>

Solution 2:

Note: I'm the LibraryThing guy, so this is partial self-promotion.

Take a look at this StackOverflow answer, which covers some good ways to get data for a given ISBN.

To your issues, Amazon includes a simple DDC (Dewey); Google does not. The WorldCat API does, but you need to be an OCLC library to use it.

The ISBN/UPC issue is complex. Prefer the ISBN, if you can find them. Mass market paperbacks sometimes sport UPCs on the outside and an ISBN on inside.

LibraryThing members have developed a few pages on the issue and on efforts to map the two:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/UPC
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/CueCat:_ISBNs_and_Barcodes

If you buy from Borders your book's barcodes will all be stickered over with their own internal barcodes (called a "BINC"). Most annoyingly whatever glue they use gets harder and harder to remove cleanly over time. I know of no API that converts them. LibraryThing does it by screenscraping.

For an API, I'd go with Amazon. LibraryThing is a good non-API option, resolving BINCs and adding DDC and LCC for books that don't have them by looking at other editions of the "work."

What's missing is the label part. Someone needs to create a good PDF template for that.

Solution 3:

Edit It would be pretty easy if you had ISBN. but converting from UPC to ISBN is not as easy as you'd like.

Here's some javascript code for it from http://isbn.nu where it's done in script

if (indexisbn.indexOf("978") == 0) {
   isbn = isbn.substr(3,9);
   var xsum = 0;
   var add = 0;
   var i = 0;
   for (i = 0; i < 9; i++) {
        add = isbn.substr(i,1);
        xsum += (10 - i) * add;
   }
   xsum %= 11;
   xsum = 11 - xsum;
   if (xsum == 10) { xsum = "X"; }
   if (xsum == 11) { xsum = "0"; }
   isbn += xsum;
}

However, that only converts from UPC to ISBN some of the time.

You may want to look at the barcode scanning project page, too - one person's journey to scan books.

So you know about Amazon Web Services. But that assumes amazon has the book and has scanned in the UPC.

You can also try the UPCdatabase at http://www.upcdatabase.com/item/{UPC}, but this is also incomplete - at least it's growing..

The library of congress database is also incomplete with UPCs so far (although it's pretty comprehensive), and is harder to get automated.

Currently, it seems like you'd have to write this yourself in order to have a high-level lookup that returns simple information (and tries each service)

Solution 4:

Sounds like the sort of job one might get a small software company to do for you...

More seriously, there are services that provide an interface to the ISBN catalog, www.literarymarketplace.com.

On worldcat.com, you can create a URL using the ISBN that will take you straight to a book detail page. That page isn't as very useful because it's still HTML scraping to get the data, but they have a link to download the book data in a couple "standard" formats.

For example, their demo book: http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780060817084 Has a "EndNote" format download link http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123348009?page=endnote&client=worldcat.org-detailed_record, and you can harvest the data from that file very easily. That's linked from their own OCLC number, not the ISBN, but the scrape to convert that isn't hard, and they may yet have a good interface to do it.

Solution 5:

My librarian wife uses http://www.worldcat.org/, but they key off ISBN. If you can scan that, you're golden. Looking at a few books, it looks like the UPC is the same or related to the ISBN.

Oh, these guys have a function for doing the conversion from UPC to ISBN.