Hi again

I played around with the ISBNdb OpenRefine queries to extract the minimum
price from their database. I had to parse the returned JSON code to do
this. In case you are interested, I've published these operations here:
https://gist.github.com/timtomch/34bc2c4c9666cf9bf011

They can be applied to your project by using OpenRefine's "Replaying
Operations" function:
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/History#replaying-operations

Have fun, and let me know if you're having any issues.
Thomas

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Thomas Guignard <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Hi Lisa
>
> One thing that comes to mind would be for you to query a book price API
> from OpenRefine using the "Add column by fetching URLs" function:
> https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Fetching-URLs-From-Web-Services
>
> Querying the Amazon database has become quite a complex affair nowadays.
> You might have better luck with the ISBNdb:
> http://isbndb.com/api/v2/docs/prices
>
> Getting a free key is a matter of seconds, and you can then query their
> service using the ISBN directly. The OpenRefine tutorial cited above should
> help you parse the JSON returned by the ISBNdb API call to extract only the
> price information. A free key only grants you 500 queries per day, so you
> may want to parse your list into smaller chunks. Or get a paid key.
> ISBNdb aggregates information from different sources, so you might need to
> decide what to do with the different prices you get: take the minimum, or
> an average, etc.
>
> However, ISBNdb's database may be less extensive than Amazon's. If you
> want to query Amazon, I'm not sure what the GitHub script you are referring
> to does, but my understanding is that it acts as a wrapper around Amazon's
> native API and reformats its output. Since this code is 5 years old, there
> are chances the API has changed since then, but you can try. You might have
> better luck querying Amazon's Product Advertising API directly, e.g. with
> https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/ItemLookup.html
>
> Good luck!
> Thomas
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Lisa McColl <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We have a large spreadsheet of titles/isbns etc that lists books from our
>> collection that are missing. To help our selectors decide whether or not
>> they want to replace the books, we would like to add a price column to the
>> spreadsheet.
>>
>> There is an Amazon "price check" script on GitHub (
>> https://github.com/JohnKimDev/Amazon-Price-Check) but I was wondering if
>> anyone knows of an extension that enables OpenRefine with Amazon. It seems
>> it would work well for our needs.
>>
>> Thank you.
>> --
>> *Lisa McColl*
>> *Cataloging/Metadata Librarian*
>> *Lehigh University*
>> *610-758-2639*
>>
>
>