[Web4lib] Amazon image function

[Walker, David]

Glen, et al.,
 
It seems to me that the advantage of querying Amazon to see if there is a book jacket would be to put in place some type of dummy 'no image available' image in the event Amazon doesn't have one.
 
But if you're not going to do that, you could save yourself a lot of extra work and potential problems by simply hard coding the image HTML into the page like this:
 
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/$isbn.01.THUMBZZZ.jpg" />
 
If Amazon doesn't have a jacket for that book, it simply returns a blank image, which your users won't see.  Ultimately, that's not all that different from what you have in your code now, and a lot less work.
 
--Dave
 
-------------------
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu

________________________________

From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Glen Wiley
Sent: Tue 1/29/2008 1:39 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] Amazon image function



Hi everyone,

I know people have discussed Amazon book images issues on this listserv
before, but here is a more technical question.

I'm using this php code to pull Amazon book cover images into a new book
list.  It does work, but I wondered if anyone had a suggestion about how
to do it better.  We aren't getting very many successful image displays
because many of them time out or error out.  So out of 100 new books, I
get 10 images appear.  Any suggestions here?

function RESTQuery($isbn){
   //1VE157GS2Z7SMVS61G02
   $base         = 'http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml';
   $query_string = '';
  
   $params = array(
       'ItemId' => "$isbn",
       'IdType' => "ASIN",
       'Service' => 'AWSECommerceService',
       'Operation' => 'ItemLookup',
       #'SearchIndex' => 'Books',
       #'sort'  => '+relevance',
       'ResponseGroup'  => 'Images',
       'AWSAccessKeyId' => '1VE157GS2Z7SMVS61G02',
       'Style' =>    "XML",
       'XMLEscaping' => "Double",
       'Version'    => "2007-07-16"
   );
  
   foreach ($params as $key => $value) {
       $query_string .= "$key=" . urlencode($value) . "&";
   }
  
   $url = "$base?$query_string"; 
  
   $xmlstr = file_get_contents($url);
   if($xmlstr == "") return;
   $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($xmlstr);
   #return $xml->asXml();
   $imageURL = $xml->Items->Item->MediumImage->URL;
  
   if($imageURL != ""){
       return "<a href=\"http://www.amazon.com\"><img src=\"$imageURL\"
/></a>";   
   }
   else{
       return "";
   }
}


--Glen



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Glen Wiley
Metadata Librarian

Metadata Services <http://metadata.library.cornell.edu/>

107E Olin Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853/
/gsw55 at cornell.edu <mailto:gsw55 at cornell.edu>
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