G'day all. I want to get hold of, regularly if possible, an ISBN based
listing of every book published. I need it in a manageable format such
as Access Database or Excel. I also, as usual, need it cheaply but i
understand that nothing is free in this life! Ideally, I would access
this list and key in an author, or a word from a title or indeed, an
ISBN number and get all books corresponding to the given criteria.
This list is around but WHERE and can I get it easily. Over to you.
Dave.

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Request for Question Clarification by webadept-ga on 07 Jun 2003 08:44 PDT

Hi, 

Perhaps we can go at it from a different angle for you. Obviously you
do not have a copy of every book ever written with an ISBN number. I
have a friend who purchased a used bookstore, and needed an easy way
to do inventory. She wanted to be able to use a hand scanner (little
wand type that read the barcodes on the backs of books) to count and
list all the paper backs into a database. I set up a Perl script to
take the ISBN and query places like Amazon, and a few others, to find
the title, current new price, author and "type" or category of the
book. This worked well for her. I set up her program to use her
database when the ISBN was available, and to query across the Internet
when it was not, and adding the ISBN to her database.

Now, if your need is similar to this, perhaps we can get you an answer
to solve your current dilemma, rather than searching for something we
may not be able to find for you.

webadept-ga

Top of the morning to you, Dave.

As you say, nothing in this life is free - and the more specialist or
limited the market, the higher the fee is likely to be.

Take a look at "Complete list of ISBN/Title/Author/Edition of in print
books" - Google Answer 203223 
<http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=203223>. 
It's a very similar question to yours.

That's just US publications.  I believe Whitakers and/or BookData
publish a similar database for UK and some other English speaking
countries, while no doubt there are French, German, Chinese etc etc
databases as well.

Amazon has one of the largest worldwide databases - though you might
have to go to the individual countries (Canada, UK, France, Germany,
Japan).  Their records are not downloadable, of course, and you
probably won't be able to buy into it, but you can access by author,
title, subject, publisher, ISBN etc.

I'm not so sure that the list is around - but other researchers may be
able to help.  Good luck!

Perhaps this website could be helpful:

http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/hylib/en/kvk.html

The british library have a free and fairly extensive database, which
returns results without much formatting and as such should be easy to
integrate into a script. URL:
http://blpc.bl.uk:80/adp0358aPaTextWelcome.jsp