John Miedema

I didn’t know it at the time, but this idea of making a book data plugin started about a year ago when I was offered some free books by Random House in exchange for a link to their website when I posted a review of the book. I thought that sounded fair, and I disclosed this fact in my About page. It got me thinking about my previous practice of linking to Amazon.

I do not pretend to understand the big world of publishing, but it makes sense to me that if anyone should be promoted when talking about a book, it should be first the author, then the publisher who put out the dollars up front to make the book. Maybe some publishers have deals with Amazon not to promote sales on their individual websites. Maybe that’s why so many publishers have such crappy websites. But I urge these publishers to rethink that practice. Things are getting scary with Amazon, especially when it comes to independent publishers. “Amazon has announced that it will only sell print-on-demand books printed by its own print-on-demand service BookSurge” (TechCrunch). The widespread practice of linking to Amazon is reinforcing its monopoly on the web. We increase competition by linking to the publisher’s website. It increases the likelihood of people finding small presses, which in turn helps diversify our reading.

In my requirements for the plugin, I said, “ideally, the publisher will link to the book entry on the publisher’s website”. I was referring to an additional link on top of the link I will give to Open Library. I knew in advance this might be difficult. I cannot find an API or screen-scrape that will give me the website for a publisher. I did, however, learn some important things. I did not know that the ISBN number contains publisher codes (Wikipedia). Digging around the ISBN sites referenced there, I learned that there are many sources of book data on the web, though the motives of the hosting organizations are not always transparent. One site, ISBNdb.com, offers an API that looks up provides publisher data by ISBN, but websites are not included.

Here’s the workaround I am going to use for now. WordPress users can add custom fields to their posts. I have added a custom field to this post, “PublisherLink”. I gave it the value of “http://www.randomhouse.ca/”. When the code runs, the publisher name looks like:
See this post — the publisher link can be added as an argument.

You can link to a particular book if the publisher provides it, or skip the link altogether. I will keep an eye for on-line databases linking ISBNs with publisher websites. Some may consider this feature irrelevant. I think it is the most important one.

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