What is the most complete (free) ISBN API?

Question

I've been using the Open Library Books API, but it lacks many of the books I have. Which API has the best coverage (especially for non-English books)?

Edit: I'm particularly interested in APIs that can be accessed from the server side and that provide metadata (author, title, publisher, year, etc).

My coverage benchmark is this arbitrary list of 101 books I own: http://pastie.org/589354. These are the ones I've tested so far and how much each got:

• Google Book Search API: 77 (missing stuff like "Agile Estimating and Planning" and "Code Complete, 2nd Edition");

• LibraryThing 70 (API is client-side javascript only and doesn't allow storing results);

• GoodReads: 64 (although there's no Books API I could find, only stuff for handling user data);

• Open Library Books API got 55;

I would appreciate if other users could add their own benchmarks as well as cite other possible APIs I can try.

Answer 1

While I don't have direct experience I found the following:

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/08/million-free-covers-from-librarything.php

And Google: http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/getting-started.html

I thought of Amazon but found a blog post that seems to state you can't use it for yourself, rather to drive traffic back to Amazon....

http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/think-you-can-use-amazon-api-for-library-service-book-covers/

Good Luck!

Answer 2

I've heard good things about isbndb, although I haven't used it myself.

Answer 3

If anyone is still interested, I just ran a couple of experiments with the same test set (which incidentally includes 105 ISBN codes, not 101 as mentioned in the question) and got the following results:

• Google Book Search API: 95 (apparently it's improving)
• Open Library Books API: 55 (same as before..)
• ISBNdb: 60
• Amazon API: 74

Whadaya know.. Google wins again :o

PS. Of the 10 books Google missed, only one was found by Amazon, so I'm getting a feeling that using a combination of two or more APIs won't bring too much..