Ross,

You can do it, but it's a two-step process. The RESTful API will give you
the "book" information based on the ISBN, and that book information has the
"work" key in it. So you can then fetch the work details with all the ISBNs
in it, but it's not pretty.

- David
 On Jan 22, 2013 12:57 PM, "Ross Singer" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Jan 21, 2013, at 8:04 PM, David Fiander <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > The documentation for the APIs is weak, and it looks like it hasn't been
> > updated for a while. Has anybody used them much, or know what the state
> of
> > ongoing development of them is?
>
> I am pretty sure that there is no ongoing development of Open Library.
>  Others may be able to provide more details.
> >
> > All I'm really looking for at this point is a way to convert an ISBN into
> > basic bibliographic data, and to find any related ISBNs, a la OCLC's
> xISBN
> > service.
>
> You can't do this via the API, because there's no way to search for
> work_id (at least none that I'm aware of).  I was running an xISBN clone
> with the OL data, but it stopped working when Talis shut down the
> Platform...
>
> The dataset isn't that large, however.  It may be worthwhile to download
> it and create your own xisbn style services.  It might be even better to
> hack up something at Code4lib13 (or, elsewhere) to take the monthly dumps
> and create a similar service.  I imagine you're not alone in wanting this.
>
> -Ross.