Produce list of book ASINs based on Author ASIN? How to? Possible?

[ItsMe]

Is there any software/a web site that will produce a list of book ASINs (just the ASINs) for a particular author ASIN?

example:

INPUT Author ASIN: B9999999

OUTPUT
Book ASINs
B8888888
B7777777
etc
(where these books are for author B9999999)

Is anyone aware of such a product/service?

[notthatamanda]

Is there a web page that shows them all? If there is you could probably use the chrome data scraper to do it. I can't remember if when you scraped data from the also boughts it gave you the ASIN number. You could try the chrome data scraper on the author page and see if it grabs that too, I'm not sure.

Bklnk could probably do it, they scrape  the ASIN numbers off the top 25 of any category, but you'd have to ask/pay them.

What are you using them for? (Just curious)

[ItsMe]

Thanks for the response.

Nothing exciting - just a way to grab ASINs for ad purposes

[idontknowyet]

I do it 1 at a time but it gives me a chance to check to see if their individual books look like they might match mine.

[Simon Haynes]

I wrote a program which snags ASINS from urls on the clipboard. So you can right-click any amazon link and choose 'copy link' (or whatever) and it extracts the ASIN or ISBN from the URL and adds it to a list.

It's not a data scraper because you manually copy the links. But it does allow you to copy ASINs from AMS ads on product pages, because a right-click opens the browser's context menu rather than clicking the cover (obviously). Because it monitors the clipboard there's no paste involved either.  I use it to go through a target author's catalogue, getting the ASINs for all their books. Or to copy the ASINs from also boughts.

[Wonder]

I wonder if Publisher Rocket would do what you're asking? You can get ASIN's associated with a keyword search. It may not be a perfect list, but I bet it would automate some of the work of tracking all those ASINs down.

[R. C.]

I wonder if Publisher Rocket would do what you're asking? You can get ASIN's associated with a keyword search. It may not be a perfect list, but I bet it would automate some of the work of tracking all those ASINs down.

It does pull ASIN in a roundabout way.  I just checked it again: --> Keyword Search --> Export --> The resulting CSV has a column for ASIN/ISBN.

CHeers,
R.C.

[Jeff Tanyard]

I wrote a program which snags ASINS from urls on the clipboard.

This doesn't surprise me in the least.   

Simon, you're like a character from one of your books.  You're that galactic handyman who always comes up with an ingenious fix to save the day.  You're Digital MacGyver.  Cheers, man.   

[Simon Haynes]

Here you go:

http://www.spacejock.com/utils/AsinExtractor.zip

You'll need the Microsoft .Net 4.8 libraries installed (Win 10 users should already have them as long as they've performed all the usual Windows Updates.)

There's no installer, just extract it to a folder and run it. Scan the thing for viruses & malware first.

I haven't added my usual 'check for update' code to the program and there's no dedicated web page as it's just a simple tool I wrote for my own use.

I may eventually do a proper release, but right now it's released as-is.

[Simon Haynes]

It has three modes of operation. The 'Listen' one is the most useful.  The second mode is where you manually paste an Amazon link into a box, and the Asin is extracted from it.

The third expects you to expand the series page for an author (usually you only see the first 10 books) and then save that entire webpage to your computer as a text file. Then you open that file and copy-paste the contents to the 'series list' box.  This would allow you to add every one of the dozens of the Goosebumps series ASINS in one hit, for example. It's not worth it for less than 10 as you can just right-click the covers and copy the URL to the clipboard, using the listening function instead.



So, as you can see it doesn't scrape any data, or access Amazon's webpages or servers in any way.  It only works by monitoring the clipboard and/or by the user pasting in a slab of text.