Online book database?

[Shohreh]

Hello,

I need to sell boxes of books that are taking space needlessly at home.

I'll first use a barcode scanner to scan each book.

Before I write a Python script to then read through the list to grab title + author from Amazon, is there a free online book database I could use?

Thank you.

[Quoth]

Each edition of same title & author has a different barcode, so Amazon may not be useful. They are certainly not complete either for older books.

[Shohreh]

It did the job when I did this over ten years ago, with very few books missing

[pdurrant]

If you're more interested in shifting the books quickly than getting the absolute best possible price, there are probably bulk buyers in France as in the UK. They'll provide software to take the ISBN and give a price.

In the UK the one I know about is https://www.webuybooks.co.uk/ They have an app for your mobile that'll use the phone's camera to scan the barcode.

[salamanderjuice]

There are ISBN databases. ISBNdb.com, ISBNsearch.org.

[maddz]

If you're planning to sell them yourself individually, you could take a look at LibraryThing to generate a catalogue. There are booksellers using the site from some of the tags one sees.

[Shohreh]

Thanks for the tips. There's a site where I can sell boxes of books for free that I used before. I just need to make a list.

Looks like isbnsearch.org is pretty good.

Before I look further, if someone here knows Python and Beautifulsoup, how do I get the author and published date?

"""
<div class="bookinfo">
	<h1>My Title</h1>
	<p><strong>ISBN-13:</strong> <a href="/isbn/123">123</a></p>
	<p><strong>ISBN-10:</strong> <a href="/isbn/456">456</a></p>
	<p><strong>Author:</strong> My Author</p>
	<p><strong>Binding:</strong> Paperback</p>
	<p><strong>Publisher:</strong> My Publisher</p>
	<p><strong>Published:</strong> 2009</p>
	<p>
		<a class="special-link" href="https://bookscouter.com/book/123" target="_blank">Sell this book</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
		<a class="special-link" href="https://www.campusbooks.com/search/123?buysellrent=buy&popup" target="_blank">Buy or Rent?</a>
	</p>
</div>
"""

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

HEADERS = ({'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US, en;q=0.5'})

url = 'https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/123'

reqs = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = BeautifulSoup(reqs.text, 'lxml')
print("Title of the website is : ",soup.head.title.string)

div = soup.find("div", attrs={"class": 'bookinfo'})
print(div.h1.string)
for p in div("p"):
	#BAD print(p.string)
	print(p.text) #OK but I'd rather get the element's string

--
Edit: Not so good… After a while, isbn.org displays a "Please Verify to Continue". I'll go back to trying Amazon.

for div in soup("div", attrs={"class": 'puisg-col-inner'}):
	book_url = div.find("a", attrs={"class": 'a-link-normal s-line-clamp-2 s-link-style a-text-normal'})
	if book_url:
		print(book_url.string)

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

Thanks for the tips. There's a site where I can sell boxes of books for free that I used before. I just need to make a list.

Looks like isbnsearch.org is pretty good.

Before I look further, if someone here knows Python and Beautifulsoup, how do I get the author and published date?

"""
<div class="bookinfo">
	<h1>My Title</h1>
	<p><strong>ISBN-13:</strong> <a href="/isbn/123">123</a></p>
	<p><strong>ISBN-10:</strong> <a href="/isbn/456">456</a></p>
	<p><strong>Author:</strong> My Author</p>
	<p><strong>Binding:</strong> Paperback</p>
	<p><strong>Publisher:</strong> My Publisher</p>
	<p><strong>Published:</strong> 2009</p>
	<p>
		<a class="special-link" href="https://bookscouter.com/book/123" target="_blank">Sell this book</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
		<a class="special-link" href="https://www.campusbooks.com/search/123?buysellrent=buy&popup" target="_blank">Buy or Rent?</a>
	</p>
</div>
"""

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

HEADERS = ({'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US, en;q=0.5'})

url = 'https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/123'

reqs = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = BeautifulSoup(reqs.text, 'lxml')
print("Title of the website is : ",soup.head.title.string)

div = soup.find("div", attrs={"class": 'bookinfo'})
print(div.h1.string)
for p in div("p"):
	#BAD print(p.string)
	print(p.text) #OK but I'd rather get the element's string

--
Edit: Not so good… After a while, isbn.org displays a "Please Verify to Continue". I'll go back to trying Amazon.

for div in soup("div", attrs={"class": 'puisg-col-inner'}):
	book_url = div.find("a", attrs={"class": 'a-link-normal s-line-clamp-2 s-link-style a-text-normal'})
	if book_url:
		print(book_url.string)

isbndb.com has an API, you get a request a second for free. Probably better for your use case.

[Shohreh]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Meanwhile, this seems to work when using Amazon. I just need to ignore suggested books that sometimes show up in a book's details:

import re
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

HEADERS = ({'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.157 Safari/537.36', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US, en;q=0.5'})

url = 'https://iww.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_66%3A123'
pattern_url = re.compile("^(.+?)/ref=")
#suggested stuff
pattern_url_bad = re.compile("^/sspa/click")
#title: Ignore stuff after dash
pattern_title = re.compile("^(.+?) - ")

reqs = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = BeautifulSoup(reqs.text, 'lxml')

for div in soup("div", attrs={"class": 'puisg-col-inner'}):
	results = div.find("a", attrs={"class": 'a-link-normal s-line-clamp-2 s-link-style a-text-normal'})
	if results:
		#sponsored stuff? ignore
		m = pattern_url_bad.search(results["href"])
		if m:
			continue

		m = pattern_url.search(results["href"])
		if m:
			url = f"https://www.amazon.com/{m.group(1)}"
			print(url)
			
			#TODO Also returns sponsored stuff in book's page sometimes?
			reqs = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS)
			soup = BeautifulSoup(reqs.text, 'lxml')

			title = soup.head.title.string
			m = pattern_title.search(title)
			if m:
				print("Title:",m.group(1))
				
			div = soup.find("div", attrs={"class": 'a-column a-span4 _follow-the-author-card_style_authorNameColumn__1YFry'})
			if div:
				print("Author:",div.text.strip())
			print("==============")