Book list - getting book details from amazon using Excel VBA barcode lookups

Question

I have a barcode reader and bunch of books. For each of the books, I want to list the book name and the author in an Excel spreadsheet.

My view is that some VBA code connecting to an Amazon web service would make this easier.

My questions is - hasn't anyone done this before? Could you point me to the best example.

Answer 1

If the barcode is the ISBN, which seems likely, perhaps you can use: amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=241582011

Answer 2

I thought it was an easy one googling, but turned out more difficult than I expected.

In fact, I was unable to find a VBA ISBN based program to get book data from the web, so decided to do one.

Here is a VBA macro using the services from xisbn.worldcat.org. Examples here.. The services are free and don't need authentication.

To be able to run it you should check at Tools-> References (in the VBE window) the "Microsoft xml 6.0" library.

This macro takes the ISBN (10 digits) from the current cell and fills the following two columns with the author and title. You should be able to loop through a full column easily.

The code has been tested (well, a bit) but there is no error checking in there.

 Sub xmlbook()
 Dim xmlDoc As DOMDocument60
 Dim xWords As IXMLDOMNode
 Dim xType As IXMLDOMNode
 Dim xword As IXMLDOMNodeList
 Dim xWordChild As IXMLDOMNode
 Dim oAttributes As IXMLDOMNamedNodeMap
 Dim oTitle As IXMLDOMNode
 Dim oAuthor As IXMLDOMNode
 Set xmlDoc = New DOMDocument60
 Set xWords = New DOMDocument60
 xmlDoc.async = False
 xmlDoc.validateOnParse = False
 r = CStr(ActiveCell.Value)

 xmlDoc.Load ("http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/" _
              + r + "?method=getMetadata&format=xml&fl=author,title")

 Set xWords = xmlDoc

     For Each xType In xWords.ChildNodes
         Set xword = xType.ChildNodes
         For Each xWordChild In xword
             Set oAttributes = xWordChild.Attributes
             On Error Resume Next
             Set oTitle = oAttributes.getNamedItem("title")
             Set oAuthor = oAttributes.getNamedItem("author")
             On Error GoTo 0
         Next xWordChild
     Next xType
  ActiveCell.Offset(0, 1).Value = oTitle.Text
  ActiveCell.Offset(0, 2).Value = oAuthor.Text
 End Sub

I did not go through Amazon because of their new "straightforward" authentication protocol ...