flex your info

This is something I’m planning to use in my plug-in and thought I’d share it here: a Yahoo! Pipes feed that takes an Amazon Web Services key and an ISBN and returns the average rating and number of reviews for the book, as well as the title, book cover, rating, and ISBN of the similar products.  Each item has up to 5 similar products associated with it.

To try it out, you need an Amazon Web Services Access Key ID. The key is passed to Amazon with web service requests to identify you as the sender of a request. You’ll also need an ISBN–which should be pretty easy to find. Once you have those, here is the URL to view the pipe as RSS:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=uJEd4EZa3hGDQwO6KGzbRw&isbn=[ISBN]&key=[Your Key]

For example, using the ISBN 0451462564 — for Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat, the most recent fiction book I read (loved it!) — the results look like this:

And the XML looks like this:

The way it works is pretty simple.  It fetches the information for the book identified with the ISBN and creates a feed item with the title of the book as the title, and the rating and ISBN information as the description.  Then it fetches the information for each of the books in the SimilarProducts item information, and constructs feed items for each of those with the title, rating information, ISBN, and book cover.  For more information about queries to pass to AWS, read my post about Rated New Fiction.  It discusses in detail the use of Yahoo! Pipes along with AWS.

Additional information could be included in the generated feed, but this was all that I really needed for my purposes.  What’s great about the pipes framework is that you can clone available pipes and tweak them to do something different, to suit your purposes.  Feel free to try this one out, and if you want to make it do something different–go ahead!