Amazon Support

[ldolse]

(2nd post of two, go back a page if you missed the previous one)
One other point - the statement Earthq points out in the first post is not included in the agreement I just accepted. I'm not in a mood to read through the whole thing, but at a glance it looks to me like this particular use doesn't violate the license agreement I just accepted.

Here are the key points of the agreement:
4.1. Permitted Uses Generally.
4.1.1. You may write a software application or Web site ("Application") that interfaces with the Services. You acknowledge that we may change, deprecate or republish APIs (as defined in Section 6.1 below) for any Service or feature of a Service from time to time, and that it is your responsibility to ensure that calls you make to any Service are compatible with then-current APIs for the Service. You further acknowledge that we may change or remove features or functionality of the Services at any time.
4.1.2. You may make network calls or requests to the Services at any time that the Services are available, provided that, unless otherwise set forth in an applicable Authorized Use Policy set forth herein for any Service ("AUP"), you (or if you build and release an Application, each installed copy of your Application) may not exceed the maximum file size or maximum calls per second limit (if any) set forth for any particular Service in its AUP (or, in the event the AUP for a Service does not indicate a maximum file size, greater than 40K).
4.2. Restricted Uses Generally.
4.2.1. You may not interfere or attempt to interfere in any manner with the functionality or proper working of the Services.
4.2.2. You may not compile or use the Amazon Properties or any other information obtained through the Services for the purpose of direct marketing, spamming, unsolicited contacting of sellers or customers, or other impermissible advertising, marketing or other activities, including, without limitation, any activities that violate anti-spamming laws and regulations.
4.2.3. You may not remove, obscure, or alter any notice of any Mark, or other intellectual property or proprietary right designation appearing on or contained within the Services or on any Amazon Properties.
4.2.4. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, you may generally publicize your use of the Services; however, you may not issue any press release with respect to the Services or this Agreement without our prior written consent.

[kovidgoyal]

Right now the returned matches are sorted by length of description. Which makes more overall sense, however, it should be possible to use the Amazon API to preferentially fetch covers from amazon if the user has also specified an ISBNDB key.

[ldolse]

Understood, but how is the user to figure out which ISBNDB key will actually exist on amazon? Description length sorting doesn't do that (though highlighting them in some other way could). If description is a concern this could also be retrieved from Amazon for ISBN's that are new and in stock there but happen to be lacking description from ISBNdb.

[ldolse]

Description length sorting also explains another odd issue. For whatever reason, audiobooks seem to always get much longer description lengths, almost always putting them at the top. However these generally fail to get a cover and of course it's guaranteed to be the wrong publisher. Would be nice to place them lower in the results...

[kovidgoyal]

Removing audio books from the list is easy to do, if they are identified as such in the returned results. Incidentally i had another look at the Amazon license and the following section seems to me to say that you can't use their API in any way except to increase the sales of their products, and I doubt getting calibre users to apply for developer accounts is a real workaround

"
Subject to the terms of this License Agreement and solely for the limited purposes of advertising Products on, and directing end users to, the Amazon Site, we grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to (a) copy and display Product Advertising Content solely on your application; (b) use only those of our trademarks and logos that we may make available to you as part of Product Advertising Content (collectively, “Amazon Marks”) solely on your application and in accordance with the Trademark Guidelines; (c) access and use the Product Advertising API, Data Feed, and Product Advertising Content solely in accordance with the Specifications and this License Agreement; and (d) access and use the Specifications solely in connection with your access to and use of the Product Advertising API. The license set forth in this Section 6 will immediately and automatically terminate if at any time you do not timely comply with any obligation under this License Agreement, or otherwise upon termination of this License Agreement. Regardless of whether the license set forth in this Section 6 is terminated, you will immediately stop using the Product Advertising API and/or Data Feed and promptly remove from your application and delete or otherwise destroy any portion of or all Product Advertising Content, as requested by us.
"

[ldolse]

Is that from EarthQ's link in the first post? That's not in the agreement I accepted when I signed up, so I think that doesn't apply for this use/type of login. I've attached what I accepted (saved it just in case).

Audiobooks have been clearly marked so far, typically in the publisher field, sometimes in the title. Will watch for some examples.

[kovidgoyal]

Hmm that license seems to not have anything specifically excluding calibre's use of AWS. What exactly did you sign up for again?

[ldolse]

The 'exact' link I clicked was this one:

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html?action=access-key

I hadn't been signed up when I clicked that, so it prompted me to create an account.

I assume it's the same thing as going through the front door and clicking the 'sign up now' button, as the pages look identical:

http://aws.amazon.com/ - click 'sign up now'

[kovidgoyal]

OK looks good. There is already some code in calibre to interface with Amazon ECS (it's in the calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon module) Have a look and see if it works with your key. If it does, we can go ahead an integrate it into metadata fetching routines, since we can use it to get reviews and ratins as well.

[ldolse]

Couldn't figure out what parent function called that one, but I grabbed the Amazon url from the source code and filled in the substitution variables with my key and the target group information.

It grabbed the data without a hiccup. Current function is hard coded for a single ISBN, that needs to be configured to be a substitution variable.

The editorial review and imageurls look like they're still correct. Rating wasn't in the xml structure I pulled, but that's probably just a matter of specfying the right groups.

[ldolse]

Adding Reviews to the ResponseGroups provided rating. Complete list of Response Groups here:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AW...roupsList.html

[kovidgoyal]

calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon import main; main('isbn', 'key');"

replace isbn and key with your ISBN and key

If you want to make changes to the code, get the file from launchpad make your changes and run

calibre-debug -u calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon /path/to/new/amazon.py

[reign]

I could be way out of my league here, and stepping on toes, but I just thought you should know there is a much easier way to get covers from Amazon.

Large Image:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312946201.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Medium Image:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312946201.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Thumbnail:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0312946201.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The first part - images.amazon.com/images/P/ is the same for all books

The second part 0312946201 is the 10 digit ISBN

The .01 is the country code for US

The ._SCMZZZZZZZ_jpg is the instruction to create a medium sized photo. - ._SCTZZZZZZZ will give you thumb sized photos, ._SCLZZZZZZZ will give you Large size photos.

Just replace the isbn using the link above and you can generate any book cover, assuming they have one for that book.

Hope that helps.

[ldolse]

Not at all, that's pretty sweet. The rest of the conversation is still pertinent to using Amazon as a general metadata source, but that's an excellent shortcut to getting images.

Kovid, tried
calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon import main; main('isbn', 'key');"

Replacing ISBN and Key as described, also tried key and group, as that's what's currently tied to variables in the function. However neither worked as I'm getting an error that calibre can't find the function:

 calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon import main; main('isbn', 'key');"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Applications/calibre Beta6.app/Contents/Resources/loaders/calibre-debug.py", line 9, in <module>
    main()
  File "/Applications/calibre Beta6.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.6/site-packages.zip/calibre/debug.py", line 155, in main
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named amazon

I'm using beta 8 of .6, and as that file is in trunk I believe it should be there....

[kovidgoyal]

I guess that module is skipped by the freezing process since it isn't used anywhere. Try rynning the calibre-debug -u command first. Oh and the correct command is

calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.metadata.amazon import main; main(args=['', 'isbn', 'key']);"