A few things...

[Robert Beveridge]

I've been banging away with BookBurro for about six months, and
ninety-eight percent of the time it works like gangbusters. There are
a few things where it doesn't, though, and I'd like to see if I can
get them stuck on the dev queue somewhere down at the bottom of the
priority list...

1. BookBurro doesn't pop up for Amazon pages where the only ISBN is an
ISBN-13, nor does it pop for any book that doesn't have an ISBN (i.e.,
one published before 1970 that has not been reprinted since the
standardization of the ISBN).
2. BookBurro doesn't pop up for any Amazon except .com (e.g., not
.co.ca, .co.uk, etc.), nor does it pop for Barnes and Noble or
Goodreads pages or book-related press releases (pr-newswire.com, etc.)
with ISBNs (though it does for Powell's, which is quite nice). I
haven't seen a pattern with other ISBN-bearing pages; sometimes it
pops, sometimes not. (Side note: if it's using a regular expression to
hunt for an ISBN on a page, I would be willing to take a look at the
code snippet and see if I can play with it; I do this for a living--
not that I'm any good at it-- so I might be able to provide a bit of
assistance.)

...dadgummit, there was another one I wanted to mention I ran across
again this morning, and now I've forgotten it. Oh, well.

Grazie,
R

--
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add "tag/reviews" to get to the good stuff without all the inanity

[jesse]

> I've been banging away with BookBurro for about six months, and
> ninety-eight percent of the time it works like gangbusters. There are
> a few things where it doesn't, though, and I'd like to see if I can
> get them stuck on the dev queue somewhere down at the bottom of the
> priority list...
>
> 1. BookBurro doesn't pop up for Amazon pages where the only ISBN is an
> ISBN-13, nor does it pop for any book that doesn't have an ISBN (i.e.,
> one published before 1970 that has not been reprinted since the
> standardization of the ISBN).

Interesting - I hadn't seen ISBN13 pages on amazon yet (but it makes
sense they have them :) ), I need to update my rules! I have a
utility that works with both formats and can convert (when
applicable).

The ISBN before 1970 is because I ws naively checking the checksums of
ISBNs, not realizing that if someone makes a mistake and uses an
invalid ISBN, they keep using it, and that there are older books, ...
I do this so that I don't pop up a dialog when I see any random 10
digit number. I need to rethink this a bit obviously.

I'm in the process of finishing a complete rewrite of most of book
burro, I'll add these issues to the list!

> 2. BookBurro doesn't pop up for any Amazon except .com (e.g., not
> .co.ca, .co.uk, etc.), nor does it pop for Barnes and Noble or
> Goodreads pages or book-related press releases (pr-newswire.com, etc.)
> with ISBNs (though it does for Powell's, which is quite nice). I
> haven't seen a pattern with other ISBN-bearing pages; sometimes it
> pops, sometimes not. (Side note: if it's using a regular expression to
> hunt for an ISBN on a page, I would be willing to take a look at the
> code snippet and see if I can play with it; I do this for a living--
> not that I'm any good at it-- so I might be able to provide a bit of
> assistance.)

the regex mostly works on URLs, but works on the page when the URL
matches certain sites. I didn't want it to pop up too often and
annoy, and when I put it in the page it was detecting things that
weren't really ISBNs. I have some ideas for improving this again, but
need to finish some other bugs. I would recommend waiting a week for
the new codebase if you want to look at the code.

happy hacking,
Jesse

[jesse]

Amazon doesn't plan on using the ISBN13s as their ASIN -
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t5/a16/103-9293197-4663828

so this is a little more complicated.

Anyone know a book that only has a ISBN13?

Jesse