Oops, actually, I just discovered that this fails to distinguish between 
true "search inside the book" and just "look inside the book". Doh.

Charles, have you come up with good ways to do this?

Jonathan

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> Excellent, thanks Charles.
>
> I can tell you that my technique seems to be working fine, if you want 
> to try it too.
>
> Construct a URL:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/ASIN
>
> Requset the URL.  Grep the response for "book is temporarily 
> unavailable"--if you get it, there's no search inside the book. If you 
> don't get it, there is search inside the book. (Sadly, it's still a 
> 200 HTTP status in response, either way).
>
> I want to look at if I can just do a HEAD request and tell the 
> difference between presence and absence of search inside by the 
> advertised length of the response. That's Terry Reese's preferred way 
> of doing a check for legitimate content at the end of a URL, trying to 
> guess from content length with just a HEAD request. Not sure if that 
> will work here or not. Would potentially be somewhat more efficient if 
> it would.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Charles Ledvina wrote:
>> I've been trying to do this same thing for quite some time.  I can 
>> tell with some certainty that there is NO search-inside-the-book info 
>> within the API response.
>>
>> --Charles Ledvina
>>
>> Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>>> Anyoen more familiar with Amazon Web Services than me (AWS) and know 
>>> the answer to this?
>>>
>>> Can I tell from my AWS API response if search inside the book is 
>>> available? Is that information anywhere?
>>>
>>> Right now, I'm calculating what the search inside the book URL 
>>> _would_ be from the ASIN (which I get from the AWS), and then making 
>>> a request to that url---and then screen-scraping for the phrase 
>>> "temporarily unavailable" which is what they say if search inside 
>>> the book doesn't exist. Sadly, they don't return 404 status in this 
>>> case, they return 200 status with that message.
>>>
>>> But this is messy. And slows down my app, since I need to make a 
>>> second http request to amazon.
>>> Anyone know if there's any way to predict it from the AWS response?
>>>
>>> The AWS documentation and my actual in practice AWS response 
>>> examples are both overwhelming and confusing me. :)
>>>
>>> Jonathan
>>
>

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu