Clubbing reprints of a book with different ISBNs

Question

Hi, I am using Google Books API to let a user search for a particular book and display the results. The problem is that different editions of the same book have different ISBNs. Is there any way to club these reprints, based on the information the API returns ?

I want to do this is because I have the ISBNs of some of the editions in my database. So when the user searches for a book, I would like to clubs all the results and display them as one result.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with this use of the word "club", but it appears that you want to group books that have the same ISBN. I don't know how to do this solely with Google Books, but you can use the wonderful xISBN web service to look up alternate ISBNs for books.

Hit a URL like

http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815

to get this response:

<rsp stat="ok">
  <isbn>0596002815</isbn>
  <isbn>1565928938</isbn>
  <isbn>1565924649</isbn>
  <isbn>0596158068</isbn>
  <isbn>0596513984</isbn>
  <isbn>1600330215</isbn>
  <isbn>8371975961</isbn>
  <isbn>059680539X</isbn>
  <isbn>8324616489</isbn>
</rsp>

Which includes first the original ISBN and then all alternates known to WorldCat. Then you can use the alternates for grouping.