Amazon API library for Python?

Question

What Python libraries do folks use for querying Amazon product data? (Amazon Associates Web Service - used to be called E-Commerce API, or something along those lines).

Based on my research, PyAWS (http://pyaws.sourceforge.net/) seems okay, but still pretty raw (and hasn't been updated in a while). Wondering if there's an obvious canonical library that I'm just missing.

Answer 1

The only other library I'm aware of is pyAmazon, which is the predecessor of pyaws. If you're familiar with the Amazon API (or are willing to become so), you could probably put together something yourself with ZSI.

Answer 2

pyaws seems to be the best one out there. I used it here (my source code) It worked fine for me.

Answer 3

pyaws is the best in my opinion. The most available version is 0.2.0, but there is also a version 0.3.0 that is somewhat harder to find. The best maintained version of it that I have found though, which is based on 0.3.0, is on bitbucket.

Answer 4

How about boto? Anyone have any experience with it? I just started looking for a Python package for Amazon and boto looks up to date (v1.8c release 28-Jun-2009), active and complete (has a long list of supported interfaces).

Answer 5

PyAWS is no longer hosted on SourceForge. The latest version (0.3.0) is available via the authors website.

Make sure you also grab the patch for Amazons latest API changes, mentioned in the comments.

Answer 6

There is now another alternative: python-amazon-product-api. It supports API version 2009-11-01.

Answer 7

The issue is what you are using it for. All I want to do is find books. This would include all the stuff amazon has for books.

• book information
• "related books"
• categories
• etc.

The idea is to cycle and recycle finding all possible books.

Amazon has the following problems:

• no one will talk to you, the buyer or even the consumer for their own services, which you pay for
• the olders python utilies for amazon do not work
• the above cycle and recycle may have been used by organizations to steal amazon's information, as organizations have been using download google's results and claiming they did it.
• way too many things, open source or otherwise, very poorly documented. The result is spending large amounts of time just trying to figure out what is available

Considering this, why would anyone buy something expensive from Amazon, such as cloud services?

Sorry for not answering the programming question.