14 For books that have an ISBN, the ASIN is
the same as the ISBN-10 for the book. According to the Wikipedia article on ASIN, you can
point to a product with an ASIN with the following URL:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{ASIN}
Take for instance, Czesl??
aw Mil??
osz??™s New and Collected Poems (paperback edition), which
has an ISBN-10 of 0060514485. You can find it on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060514485
It is important to know that the way to link to Amazon has changed in the past and will
likely continue to change. For instance, you can also link to the book with this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060514485
or even with this shorter form:
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0060514485
CHAPTER 2 ?– UNCOVERING THE MASHUP POTENTIAL OF WEB SITES 53
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Standard_Identification_Number
Using this syntax would ideally be founded on some official documentation from Amazon.
Where would you find definitive documentation on how to structure a link to a product of
a given ASIN? My search through the Amazon developers??™ site led to the technical documentation,
15 whose latest version at the time of writing was the April 4, 2004, edition.16 That trail leads
ultimately to a page on the use of identifiers, which, alas, does not spell out how to formulate
the URL for an item with a given ASIN.17 The bottom line for now is that Wikipedia, combined
with experimentation, is the best way to discern the URL structures of Amazon.
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