#257 Amazon link fails on ISBN-13 with no ISBN-10

[Darrah Chavey]

With <a href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?337171">this book</a>, the attempt to click the "Amazon US" link gave a 404 error, no such book. However, the book does exist on Amazon, and a direct search on Amazon for the ISBN-13 of that book, 978-0-7864-5711-3, finds the correct book. However, doing an Amazon search on the ISBN-10 equivalent for that book, 0-7864-5711-2, also fails to find the book. It may be that for newer books only issued with ISBN-13, the Amazon link (and possibly other links as well) will fail using our current algorithm.

[Uzume]

That is because that is a Kindle edition, however, in general the issue is because the Amazon links we provide are not doing a search but rather linking directly to the detail page. The detail page is always at a URL containing their ASIN which happens to be for most published books the same as its ISBN-10. That however is not guaranteed to always be true and in a number of situations is certainly not true (the listed pub being one example).

Unfortunately Amazon does not provide a way to search by ISBN and land on their detail page. They do however provide a means to link to an ISBN search. This usually also works for both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13.

For example the correct way to link to the search for the cited in this report is: http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-isbn=9780786457113 This works on all the other Amazon sites as well. Wikipedia links to Amazon via ISBN in this fashion; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources

[Uzume]

I would also like to see other Amazon links added such as CN, IT, and JP (perhaps that is a separate FR however).

[Darrah Chavey]

A link that seems to work as well is:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=9780786457113
Again, this works with the 13 digit ISBN, but fails with the 10 digit version. One possible fix might be to include code that could detect if the page returned was bad, and change to trying the 13-digit ISBN instead. It might even be possible that ALWAYS converting to the 13-digit ISBN and sending that request worked for older books that didn't initially have such ISBN's. It seems that Amazon internally uses those anyway, even for older books.

[Uzume]

I added improved Amazon search linking to ISFDB's Mediawiki. This can be seen with "ISBN" links on pages or directly at: http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Booksources

[Uzume]

Yes darrah, that link works as well but is not as specific as you are searching for any keyword and not just an ISBN and you are not limiting the search to just books. Potentially that search might find other products that mention that book edition via ISBN, etc.

[Ahasuerus]

Fixed in biblio/common.py 1.78 by linking to the Amazon ISBN search page for ebooks. Installed in r2014-67 on 2014-01-26. Closing.

[Ahasuerus]

Part 2: fixed the links on the Moderator Approval page for New Pubs. Implemented in mod/pv_new.py 1.23, installed in r2014-70 on 2014-01-26.