Book list - getting book details from amazon using Excel VBA barcode lookups

Question

I have a barcode reader and bunch of books. For each of the books, I want to list the book name and the author in an Excel spreadsheet.

My view is that some VBA cod

Answer 1

I just found this thread as I was attempting to do the same thing. Unfortunately I'm on a MAC, so these answers don't help. With a bit of research I was able to do get it to work in MAC Excel with this module:

Option Explicit

' execShell() function courtesy of Robert Knight via StackOverflow
' http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6136798/vba-shell-function-in-office-    2011-for-mac

Private Declare Function popen Lib "libc.dylib" (ByVal command As String,       ByVal mode As String) As Long
Private Declare Function pclose Lib "libc.dylib" (ByVal file As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function fread Lib "libc.dylib" (ByVal outStr As String, ByVal size As Long, ByVal items As Long, ByVal stream As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function feof Lib "libc.dylib" (ByVal file As Long) As Long

Function execShell(command As String, Optional ByRef exitCode As Long) As String
    Dim file As Long
    file = popen(command, "r")

    If file = 0 Then
        Exit Function
    End If

    While feof(file) = 0
        Dim chunk As String
        Dim read As Long
        chunk = Space(50)
        read = fread(chunk, 1, Len(chunk) - 1, file)
        If read > 0 Then
            chunk = Left$(chunk, read)
            execShell = execShell & chunk
        End If
    Wend

    exitCode = pclose(file)
End Function

Function HTTPGet(sUrl As String) As String

    Dim sCmd As String
    Dim sResult As String
    Dim lExitCode As Long
    Dim sQuery As String

    sQuery = "method=getMetadata&format=xml&fl=*"
    sCmd = "curl --get -d """ & sQuery & """" & " " & sUrl
    sCmd = "curl --get -d """ & sQuery & """" & " " & sUrl

    sResult = execShell(sCmd, lExitCode)

    ' ToDo check lExitCode

    HTTPGet = sResult

End Function

Function getISBNData(isbn As String) As String
  Dim sUrl As String
  sUrl = "http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/" & isbn
  getISBNData = HTTPGet(sUrl)

End Function



Function getAttributeForISBN(isbn As String, info As String) As String
  Dim data As String
  Dim start As Integer
  Dim finish As Integer


 data = getISBNData(isbn)
 start = InStr(data, info) + Len(info) + 2
 finish = InStr(start, data, """")
 getAttributeForISBN = Mid(data, start, finish - start)


End Function

This is not all my original work, I pasted it together from another site, then did my own work. Now you can do things like:

getAttributeForISBN("1568812019","title")

This will return the title of that book. Of course you can apply this formula to all of the ISBNs in column A to look up multiple titles, or authors, or whatever.

Hopefully this helps someone else out there!