Target Amazon Sales

How do I find relevant books?

[olwen]

I have a couple of pages on my web site which show hand-picked selections of books from Amazon. I want to build up a database of material related to my site, that I can select randomly to appear on pages. (I will target the books to the page subject). Is there an easy way to search for the material and show the ASIN to make my database compilation easier. I'm finding it tiresone at the moment.

[jeremy goodrich]

If it's a smallish site, doing it by hand shouldn't be too bad, especially for static content. After you've done it once, you won't need to do it again.

If it's dynamic, you might look into a scripting language like Perl or PHP to fetch the stuff for you and store it in a database.

Last time I looked through scripting repositories, it seemed like there were Amazon related stuff listed...hotscripts.com is a one place to check out, also sourceforge.net, and freshmeat.net - they all have scripts in Perl, PHP, etc.

[Grumpus]

Have you looked into Amazon Web Services? All you'd need to do is pass the subject of the page to an AWS Keyword search and up to 10 listings will show right on the page with current pricing, availability and all of that sort of stuff.

Through web services, I've tailored Amazon to meet the demands of my site, not tailored my site to make it work with Amazon. Real nice.

G.

[olwen]

I'm going to use PHP to serve the stuff -- ny problem is getting a list that easily shows me titles and ASIN. I have a slowwww dialup and it tedious working through the normal searches - I wondered if anyon had any tricks.

< added >
Actually using webservices to search for relevant stuff I can then select manually is the sort of idea I had. I want to be picky about what I advertise.