How can I use Amazon's API in PHP to search for books?

Question

I'm working on a Facebook app for book sharing, reviewing, and recommendations. I've scoured the web, searched Google using every search phrase I could think of, but I could not find any tutorials on how to access the Amazon.com API for book information.

I signed up for an AWS account, but even the tutorials on their website didn't help me one bit. They're all geared toward using cloud computing for file storage and processing, but that's not what I want.

I just want to access their API to search info on books. Kind of like how http://openlibrary.org/ does it, where it's a simple URL call to get information on a book (but their databases aren't nearly as populated as Amazon's).

Why is it so damned hard to find the information I need on Amazon's AWS site? If anybody could help, I would greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

You could let Zend Framework do the work for you using Zend_Service_Amazon. From what I see it's fairly easy to use, and for simple queries the examples should be enough.

Answer 2

You want to be looking at their affiliate program, which now appears to be under "advertising". As I recall, it's free to sign up and it works on a referral commission basis. There is nothing specifically for books, you would need to lookup the category ID for books, then you can query on that. There API is pretty extensive and has specific "fields" for different types of product.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html

I used the Amazon API for a Facebook app at my last job called Gift-O-Matic (terrible name), that included books from Amazon as a category. The Zend Amazon lib is a good start, but I found it too verbose and rolled my own.

Answer 3

Also, CloudFusion has very thorough support for the Product Advertising API. http://github.com/cloudfusion/cloudfusion