Amazon Reviews from Different Editions of the Same Book

A couple of days ago I posted a Yahoo pipe that showed how to Look Up Alternative Copies of a Book on Amazon, via ThingISBN. The main inspiration for that hack was that it could be useful to get “as new” prices for different editions of the same book if you’re not so bothered about which edition you get, but you are bothered by the price. (Or maybe you wanted an edition of a book with a different cover…)

It struck me last night that it might also be useful to aggregate the reviews from different editions of the same book, so here’s a hack that will do exactly that: produce a feed listing the reviews for the different editions of a particular book, and label each review with the book it came from via its cover:

The pipe starts exactly as before – get an ISBN, check that the ISBN is valid, then look up the ISBNs of the alternative editions of the book. The next step is to grab the Amazon comments for each book, before annotating each item (that is, each comment) with a link to the book cover that the review applies to; we also grab the ISBN (the ASIN) for each book and make a placeholder using it for the item link and image link:

Then we just create the appropriate URLs back to the Amazon site for that particular book edition:

The patterns are as follows:
– book description page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN
– book cover image: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ISBN.01.TZZZZZZZ

Here’s how the nested pipe that grabs the comments works (Amazon book reviews lookup by ISBN pipe): first construct the URL to call the webservice that gets details for a book with a particular ISBN – the large report format includes the reviews:

Grab the results XML and point to the reviews (which are at Items.Item.CustomerReviews.Review):

Construct a valid RSS feed containing one comment per item:

And there you have it – a pipe that looks up the different editions of a particular book using ThingISBN, and then aggregates the Amazon reviews for all those editions.