Amazon search works again

I’ve fixed the problems with Amazon searching on BookMooch, so these things should all work again:

– browse for books, search amazon http://bookmooch.com/m/browse

– add books with amazon search http://bookmooch.com/m/add

– moochbar http://bookmooch.com/m/moochbar

– accented chåràctérs such as searching for Émile

Over the past few days, it was possible, if you were persistent, to add a book to BookMooch from Amazon with just the ISBN number, but unfortunately no information was brought in from Amazon about the book. There were a few thousand titles in BookMooch like this: books without author or title information. I’ve written a small program to find all these books and to pull the missing info from Amazon. This should be complete in a few hours: if you still see books without an author and title (in a few hours), please inform tech support about it so I can try to fix it.

The one thing I cannot get to work is searching for Japanese text against amazon.co.jp. Japanese users of BookMooch will need to use the ISBN number to search Amazon inside BookMooch, or find the book at Amazon.co.jp and add it to BookMooch with the moochbar. Note, however, that once a Japanese book is in BookMooch, that the BookMooch search does work with Japanese.

If you have any further problems searching Amazon from within BookMooch, please post a blog comment here with details.

-john

Amazon searching in BM unavailable for a day or two

Searching Amazon inside BookMooch isn’t working at the moment, and it’ll probably take me a day or two to get it working again.

The reason is that Amazon has added an extra encryption/authentication step to its programming API, and BookMooch needs to support it.

Amazon did send email newsletters warning about the change, but they kept referring to their “Product Advertising API”, which isn’t something I thought I used. However, apparently the “Product Advertising API” is Amazon’s new name for “Amazon Web Services”, and it really is what BookMooch uses. Whoops, sorry!

I’m sure I can get this working, but it has some complicated bits to it, so it might take me 48 hours to get it right.

-john