How to fetch a Book Title from an ISBN number? [closed]

Answer 1

As an alternative to isbndb (which seems like the perfect answer) I had the impression that you could pass an ISBN into an Amazon product URL to go straight to the Amazon page for the book. While this doesn't programmatically return the book title, it might have been a useful extra feature in case you wanted to link to Amazon user reviews from your database.

However, this link appears to shows that I was wrong. Actually what Amazon uses is the ASIN number and while this used to be the same as 10-digit ISBN numbers, those are no longer the only kind - ISBNs now have 13 digits (though there is a straight conversion from the old 10-digit type).

But more usefully, the same link does talk about the Amazon API which can convert from ISBN to ASIN and is likely to also let you look up titles and other information. It is primarily aimed at Amazon affiliates, but no doubt it could do the job if for some reason isbndb does not.

Edit: Tim Spalding above points out a few practical facts about ISBNs - I was slightly too pessimistic in assuming that ASINs would not correspond any more.

Answer 2

Google has it's own API for Google Books that let's you query the Google Book database easily. The protocol is JSON based and you can view the technical information about it here.

You essentially just have to request the following URL :

https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:YOUR_ISBN_HERE

This will return you the information about the book in a JSON format.

Answer 3

Although the other answers are correct, this one explains the process in a little more detail. This one uses the GOOGLE BOOKS API.

https://giribhatnagar.wordpress.com/2015/07/12/search-for-books-by-their-isbn/

All you need to do is
1.Create an appropriate HTTP request
2.Send it and Receive the JSON object containing detail about the book
3.Extract the title from the received information
The response you get is in JSON. The code given on the above site is for NODE.js but I'm sure it won't be difficult to reproduce that in PHP(or any other language for that matter).

Answer 4

To obtain data for given ISBN number you need to interact with some online service like isbndb. One of the best sources for bibliographic information is Amazon web service. It provides you with all bibliographic info + book cover.