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

Answer 1

You can find a PHP implemented ISBN lookup tool at Dawson Interactive.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Working in the library world we simply connect to the LMS pass in the barcode and hey presto back comes the data. I believe there are a number of free LMS providers - Google for "open source lms".

Note: This probably works off ISBN...

Answer 4

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>

Answer 5

I'm afraid the problem is database access. Companies pay to have a UPC assigned and so the database isn't freely accessible. The UPCdatabase site mentioned by Philip is a start, as is UPCData.info, but they're user entered--which means incomplete and possibly inaccurate.

You can always enter in the UPC to Google and get a hit, but that's not very automated. But it does get it right most of the time.

I thought I remembered Jon Udell doing something like this (e.g., see this), but it was purely ISBN based.

Looks like you've found a new project for someone to work on!

Answer 6

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.