On Tuesday 22 February 2005 1:39 pm, MJ Ray wrote:
To convert to ISBN, remove the country code from the start (I think 978 is ISBN or "Bookland" as some Americans I know call it) and the UPC check digit (the last one). Recalculate the check digit by multiplying the other digits by their positions, so 009942692 is 1*0 + 2*0 + 3*9 + 4*9 + 5*4 + 6*2 + 7*6 + 8*9 + 9*2 = 0 + 0 + 27 + 36 + 20 + 12 + 42 + 72 + 18 = 227 now take 227 mod 11 = 7 and that's the last digit of the ISBN. If it comes out as 10 then it's written as X.
It would be cool to use the distributed free software ISBNsearch for the book lookups, from http://www.isbn.org.uk/ but I've not time to hack it right now.
Cheers for the description of the barcode thing MJ, gawd only knows how/why you know that.
The ISBNsearch thing looks to be really useful as well, they even provide public access to their sql server via a little php script, so with a bit of twiddling it should be possible for me to hack together something to dump the data into the relevant tables in the Library database. This is going to be a rainy day project someday when I have some free time, so as always if there is somebody out there who fancies giving it a shot then make yourself known.
Another little question, I have just gotten the picture support to work properly in the Library, does anyone know if it's legal to nick images from Amazon and present them on another site without crediting the source ?