Given a ISBN/ASIN, how to get the list of all books by the same author (including kindle only books)?

Question

Most kindle books don't have ISBN, just ASIN. Given a ISBN or ASIN, is it possible to get the list of all books by the same author (both paper and ebooks)? Does amazon have some kind of author ID, that uniquely identifies authors?

Answer 1

Depends on how you want this to work. A quick search brought me to http://isbndb.com/data-intro.html You could to a search for the ISBN and get the result. That result contains the author's name that you can run a second search on to return your list.

Answer 2

Amazon has this concept of "entity pages." Every author has one (as do cars and probably lots of other stuff.) They're not just a text search, they're a bona fide relationship between products. For example:

http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-King/e/B000AQ0842
http://www.amazon.com/1998-Toyota-Tacoma/e/B004CGPSQY

These entities are themselves ASINs and it seems you can search for that ASIN and get all the products under that entity. E.g. this returns 365 products:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=B000AQ0842

That's not just books, that's mouse pads and t-shirt and everything else too. But the search API should let you limit by category.

Getting that entity ASIN though, not sure how to do that programmatically. If you look at an arbitrary Stephen King book and view source, that entity ASIN shows up in there. You could probably scrape for it.

Answer 3

Using the Amazon Product Advertising API, you can do an ItemLookup on ASIN first. This will give you author (as well as other things). You can then do an ItemSearch with "author" as parameter. This is textual -- afaik there is no author ID - the API only operates with names.

See the documentation for the API for more info.

Answer 4

Use Open Library. You can search by ISBN and ASIN, and get an author ID, then search by author. There are also fewer restrictions on your use of the data.