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January 22, 2004Extreeeeeeme ISBNs! OCLC and xISBNThe OCLC has a cool little project called xISBN. It lets you provide an ISBN and get a list of associated ISBNs (from reprints, other editions, etc.) It's available at http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/xisbn/ Actually the link for the xISBN looks like this: http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/ISBNNUMBER Where ISBNNUMBER is replaced with a book's ISBN. This works really well with books that have been republished several times over a long period. Let's do Prince Caspian, book 2 in the Chronicles of Naria. The copy I have is an old Collier edition with the ISBN of 0812522907. Searching for http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/0020442408 gives me about 18 listed ISBNs. Taking one of them at random and searching for it at Amazon shows me a Penguin edition of the book. The ISBN is list is interesting, but what really fires me up is what could be done with this information. How about a script that automatically feeds these searches into ABEbooks or some similar used book database? Or just a bookmarklet that quickly allows you to query these in Amazon? Stay tuned as I experiment. Posted to Reference-Libraries-Collections | TrackBack
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