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