Looking up Editions of a Book

Question

Is there a way to look up the various editions of a book based on its ISBN using the Amazon Product Advertising API?

And, more generally, what are the various choices for looking up edition metadata on a book? Only one I know of for sure is the xISBN api from worldcat

On my site we have a "more editions" button for when people search for books.. so I'd be making a lot of queries (and cacheing them).

Answer 1

You could use OCLC's xISBN API - give it an ISBN and it gives you a set of all ISBNs that are the same "work" - other editions, translations, etc. It will give you something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rsp xmlns="http://worldcat.org/xid/isbn/" stat="ok">
    <isbn form="BA" year="2004" lang="eng" ed="2nd ed.">0596002815</isbn>
    <isbn form="BA DA" year="1999" lang="eng">1565928938</isbn>
    <isbn form="BA" year="1999" lang="eng" ed="1st ed.">1565924649</isbn>
</rsp>

Unfortunately, it is not free. Here is the pricing.

Answer 2

Take a look at https://sourceforge.net/projects/isbntools/files/latest/download. The command isbn editions ISBN will give you what you want...

If you are a developer you have https://pypi.python.org/pypi/isbntools.