Amazon translator pulling open worldcat record

lwebb
Starting today, records imported from the amazon page are pulling down the record from open worldcat instead of amazon, which results in both isbn 10 and 13 placed in the isbn field, and other anomalies.
  • dstillman
    Background: https://github.com/zotero/translators/commit/ecc40d9660df478229a0552d883ba814fee25c60
  • adamsmith
    we should probably pin this, this will come up a lot.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited June 11, 2013
    Is the problem that all users use the same API key, or that the API key is published on GitHub (and present in plain text in the translator files)?
  • Simon
    The latter. While we could conceivably proxy requests through our server, there are also other conditions in the product advertising API terms of service that are potentially problematic.
  • mheim
    Ok, I understand that there was no real alternative option. But essentially, it results in useless scraps for anything that doesn't have an ISBN.

    I used the amazon-importer for my film-collection, and now it just imports every dvd as a book, lists every contributor as a director, doesn't add any of the useful meta-data, etc.
    This really should improve fast, as the amazon-import is a major feature.
  • RintzeRintze
    @mheim (and other interested users), it can't hurt for you to give Amazon some feedback on this. But they're a for-profit company, and apparently they don't see value in providing metadata about their products without strong restrictions on their API use.
  • dstillman
    To be clear, the issue is just that the product advertising API requires the same sort of API key as all their other products (e.g., their cloud services), and they have systems that (quite reasonably and helpfully) scour the web for API keys to make sure that people's keys haven't leaked out—which for many other services of theirs would be very bad indeed.

    We could sign the Amazon requests via our servers without proxying them, but that'd be another service that we'd have to keep running, and even though we wouldn't log them we'd technically have access to all the URLs people were saving from, which right now isn't the case for any other translators used via the main clients.
  • Simon
    If you can provide URLs of pages where the metadata is incorrect, we can improve the new translator.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited June 19, 2013
    I understand. But folks could ask Amazon to make the desired metadata available via other ways than their API. E.g. by embedding it in the pages.
  • timtak
    Japanese Amazon's data now comes up in English, which is completely useless. I am not sure what to do.
  • adamsmith
    I don't know if we'll be able to get the international amazon pages to work as well as they used to before. Likely not. It's a lot of work and very fragile without the API. Best idea would be to use other sources - library catalogs e.g.

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