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Would it be possible to make a program which would go online, take in a book title as a parameter and then search through amazon in a searcha nd return the tags and other information from the website?

Just a thought for all of my ebooks to catalogue into a database.

Thanks guys...

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A practical, low‑risk plan for cataloging your ebooks (response to , following 's legal point).

For reliably getting book metadata without screen‑scraping, prefer official APIs and open datasets: use the Google Books API to search titles, retrieve metadata and cover images; use Open Library for free, community‑editable bibliographic data; and use Amazon’s Product Advertising API only if you need Amazon‑specific fields and follow its registration/usage rules. (developers.google.com)

Suggested workflow:

  1. Extract local metadata (title, author, ISBN) directly from the ebook file — tools like Calibre’s ebook-meta make this easy from the command line.
  2. If an ISBN exists, query Google Books or Open Library by ISBN (this gives the most reliable one‑to‑one match). If no ISBN, do a fuzzy title+author search and verify results before saving.
  3. Normalize fields (one ISBN/ASIN, canonical title, authors, publisher, pub date, subjects/categories, cover URL) and store provenance (which API or file gave each field). (manual.calibre-ebook.com)

If you want "tags" or keywords, extract the book text (or first N KB for large files) and run a simple keyword extraction/TF‑IDF or RAKE pipeline locally — no need to crawl other sites. For large volumes, respect API rate limits and provider rules; Open Library documents acceptable usage and offers bulk dumps if you need large datasets. (openlibrary.org)

Practical notes: prefer ISBN lookups for accuracy, keep API keys private, log which source supplied each field, and avoid ad‑hoc scraping of retail pages (APIs and open data are a safer, more maintainable route).

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Member Avatar for griswolf

Possible, probably. However neither legal nor ethical.

Excerpted from the Amazon Conditions of Use

Amazon grants you a limited license to access and make personal use of this site and not to download (other than page caching) or modify it, or any portion of it, except with express written consent of Amazon. This license does not include any resale or commercial use of this site or its contents; any collection and use of any product listings, descriptions, or prices; any derivative use of this site or its contents; any downloading or copying of account information for the benefit of another merchant; or any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.

They might allow you a limited license if you asked nicely. Maybe.

Edited by griswolf because: n/a
Member Avatar for Spiderpig085

Is that rule, more or less for a commercial use of the information? I just want it for a home collection???

Member Avatar for griswolf

Lawyers wrote it, lawyers and managers will decide whether to apply it in this case, and they will decide based on considerations that have only peripherally to do with your intended use. Things such as whether letting you do it is letting the camel's nose into the tent, whether your case would be cheap to prosecute and worthwhile publicity, whether the manager is in a good mood (lawyers are never) etc. As I said:

They might allow you a limited license if you asked nicely. Maybe.

Member Avatar for Spiderpig085

would any of you guys know the best ways to write a script to go online and.... using a tag cloud website, add a file to the upload box and then return the results of the website to a text file?? complicated i know. I dont need any code, I just dont have a clue where to start

Member Avatar for griswolf

Got a new question? Start a new thread. Is this thread "solved"? Then original poster can mark it solved via the link on the bottom of the thread.

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