yuwash

Today, we get all the useful information from the internet in just a few minutes of clicking, typing and surfing. However, what interesting/useful books are in my very own bookshelf(ves)? Very very very very few people has a catalogue of books in your home like in the library so that you easily find anything you’ve bought years ago. No, books (as well as other stuffs, but just concentrate on them for now) are just continuing to accumulate in the shelf becoming continuously forgotten by their owner.

Now, the idea is to take use of the internet to fix this problem! You don’t need to go through every book in your shelf like a librarian and collect information like author, publishing date, whatever, whatever, but there’s a good tool that delivers them all: Worldcat. The nice people at OCLC have provided us good APIs we can use, described here: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm

Let’s try:

import urllib
kickthehabitbook=urllib.urlopen('http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9789280729269?method=getMetadata&fl=*&format=json')
print kickthehabitbook.read()

Year! Do you see the meta info of the book now? Change the ISBN by playing a bit with your old (forgotten) books! With the built-in json library, converting the string to a simple dictionary is equally easy:

import json
#do this again because we can only read once (seek(0) doesn'twork)
kickthehabitbook=urllib.urlopen('http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9789280729269?method=getMetadata&fl=*&format=json')
#fetch the first entry (usually there's just one anyway)
metainfo=json.load(kickthehabitbook)['list'][0]
kickthehabitbook.close() #we don't need it anymore

This is now the simple class “book”, inherited from built-in dict:

class book(dict):
  def __init__(self,isbn,meta={},upgrade=True):
    self.isbn=isbn
    self.update(meta)
    if upgrade:
      self.upgradebookmeta()

  def upgradebookmeta(self):
    bomejsur=urllib.urlopen("http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/"+self.isbn+"?method=getMetadata&fl=*&format=json")
    self.update(json.load(bomejsur)['list'][0])
    bomejsur.close()

The complete working script for managing your books is here: https://github.com/yuwash/Blaetter