Jump to content

User:Heavenhelllord/ISBMdb.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ISBNdb.com is a website that attempts to build a free database of books by querying various libraries across the world for book data. The results are then cross-indexed by a variety of parameters (authors, publishers, subjects, similarity, etc.) and are presented on the website in an organized format. Original MARC records are available for download too.

As of May 2006, the site has data on more than 2 million unique ISBNs and corresponding books searchable by title, ISBN, author, subject, and other criteria. Approximately 2000-5000 records are added daily.

The ISBNdb.com website also offers book price comparison that searches for books availability and pricing in many online stores. Inclusion of large used book dealers (Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, etc) allows it to effectively search the inventory of thousands of individual bookstores. Price comparisons at ISBNdb.com are unique in a way that book pricing is displayed almost instantaneously, in parallel to normal book browsing.

Remote Access API

[edit]

Effective July 2005, ISBNdb.com offers an XML based remote access API that allows access to all of the same data that is displayed on the website itself. In some areas the API data is even more detailed. For instance, it allows to check price changes history on books, a feature not yet available on the browsable website itself.

Project history

[edit]

ISBNdb.com was started in 2001 as a hobby project by Andrew Maltsev out of frustration in trying to find a free source of book data on the internet for his other project (ironically this other project never went out of beta testing, it may get integrated into ISBNdb.com at a later date).

The website is now a project of Ejelta LLC, a small company owned by Andrew.

[edit]