← Back to Blog

How to Convert Amazon ASIN to Book ISBN

As a data scientist, or a software engineer, you may often find yourself working with various identifiers used in bibliographic referencing. Today, we are going to discuss how to convert Amazon’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) to a book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number). This conversion is essential when you’re dealing with large datasets of books sourced from Amazon and you need to standardize your data to align with international conventions.
By Saturn Cloud | | Miscellaneous

How to Convert Amazon ASIN to Book ISBN

As a data scientist, or a software engineer, you may often find yourself working with various identifiers used in bibliographic referencing. Today, we are going to discuss how to convert Amazon’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) to a book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number). This conversion is essential when you’re dealing with large datasets of books sourced from Amazon and you need to standardize your data to align with international conventions.

What is ASIN?

ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, a 10-character alphanumeric unique identifier assigned by Amazon and its partners for product identification within the Amazon organization. Every product sold on Amazon, including books, has an ASIN.

While the ASIN is unique to Amazon, physical books also have an associated ISBN, which might be the same as their ASIN if the book is a physical edition. However, this isn’t always the case. Kindle editions have a separate ASIN and do not have an ISBN.

What is ISBN?

ISBN, short for International Standard Book Number, is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code. It’s a global standard used by publishers, libraries, universities, wholesalers, and retailers to identify books.

Why Convert ASIN to ISBN?

The ASIN is specific to Amazon. If you’re dealing with a dataset that includes book data from multiple sources, you’ll likely encounter inconsistencies. If you want to merge your Amazon book data with data from other sources, it’s useful to convert ASINs to ISBNs. This conversion allows you to standardize your data and make your analysis more consistent and reliable.

How to Convert ASIN to ISBN

Using Amazon Product Advertising API

One of the most reliable methods to convert ASINs to ISBNs is by using the Amazon Product Advertising API. This API allows you to access more detailed product information than what’s available on the Amazon website, including the ISBN of a book.

To use this API, you’ll need an Amazon Associate account and an API key. Once you have these, you can start making requests to the API to retrieve the ISBN for a given ASIN.

Here’s a sample Python code:

import bottlenose
amazon = bottlenose.Amazon(YOUR_AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY, YOUR_AMAZON_SECRET_KEY, YOUR_AMAZON_TAG)
response = amazon.ItemLookup(ItemId="ASIN", ResponseGroup="ItemAttributes", SearchIndex="Books")

In the response XML, look for the “ISBN” field.

Using Web Scraping

Alternatively, you can also use web scraping to extract the ISBN from the product details section of a book’s Amazon page. The Python library BeautifulSoup is a great tool for this job.

Here’s a sample Python code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def get_book_isbn(asin):
    url = f"https://www.amazon.com/dp/{asin}"
    headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
    product_details = soup.find("table", {"id": "productDetailsTable"}).get_text()
    isbn = re.search(r'ISBN-13: (\d+-\d+-\d+-\d+-\d+)', product_details).group(1)
    return isbn

Note that while this method can be effective, it’s less reliable than using the API, and scraping Amazon’s pages is against their terms of service. So, use this method judiciously and respect Amazon’s rules.

In conclusion, converting Amazon’s ASIN to a book’s ISBN can help standardize your data when dealing with book datasets from multiple sources. Using the Amazon Product Advertising API or web scraping are two methods you can use for this conversion. As always, when working with APIs or web scraping, respect the rules and terms of service of the data provider.

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is your all-in-one solution for data science & ML development, deployment, and data pipelines in the cloud. Spin up a notebook with 4TB of RAM, add a GPU, connect to a distributed cluster of workers, and more. Join today and get 150 hours of free compute per month.

Try Saturn Cloud Now