How can I lookup data about a book from its barcode number?

Question

I'm building the world's simplest library application. All I want to be able to do is scan in a book's UPC (barcode) using a typical scanner (which just types the numbers of the barcode into a field) and then use it to look up data about the book... at a minimum, title, author, year published, and either the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress catalog number.

The goal is to print out a tiny sticker ("spine label") with the card catalog number that I can stick on the spine of the book, and then I can sort the books by card catalog number on the shelves in our company library. That way books on similar subjects will tend to be near each other, for example, if you know you're looking for a book about accounting, all you have to do is find SOME book about accounting and you'll see the other half dozen that we have right next to it which makes it convenient to browse the library.

There seem to be lots of web APIs to do this, including Amazon and the Library of Congress. But those are all extremely confusing to me. What I really just want is a single higher level function that takes a UPC barcode number and returns some basic data about the book.

Answer 1

There's a very straightforward web based solution over at ISBNDB.com that you may want to look at.

Edit: Updated API documentation link, now there's version 2 available as well

Link to prices and tiers here

You can be up and running in just a few minutes (these examples are from API v1):

• register on the site and get a key to use the API

• try a URL like:

  http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key={yourkey}&index1=isbn&results=details&value1=9780143038092

The results=details gets additional details including the card catalog number.

As an aside, generally the barcode is the isbn in either isbn10 or isbn13. You just have to delete the last 5 numbers if you are using a scanner and you pick up 18 numbers.

Here's a sample response:

<ISBNdb server_time="2008-09-21T00:08:57Z">
  <BookList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
    <BookData book_id="the_joy_luck_club_a12" isbn="0143038095">
      <Title>The Joy Luck Club</Title>
      <TitleLong/>
      <AuthorsText>Amy Tan, </AuthorsText>
      <PublisherText publisher_id="penguin_non_classics">Penguin (Non-Classics)</PublisherText>
      <Details dewey_decimal="813.54" physical_description_text="288 pages" language="" edition_info="Paperback; 2006-09-21" dewey_decimal_normalized="813.54" lcc_number="" change_time="2006-12-11T06:26:55Z" price_time="2008-09-20T23:51:33Z"/>
    </BookData>
  </BookList>
</ISBNdb>