It's not a new identifier — it's just the proprietary identifier that Amazon has always used on their site. That's not something we've ever planned to support.
I'm not sure why you'd have an ASIN when not already on an Amazon product page, but you can presumably just do a web search for the ASIN, click the top result, and save from there.
(Also, as Wikipedia notes, "For books with 10-digit International Standard Book Number (ISBN), the ASIN and the ISBN are the same.")
So it is an identifier that could be used to lookup metadata, which is what is being asked for - a means to import metadata into Zotero to save having to type loads of stuff manually.
I do understand that Amazon's business model may be distasteful to some, but no-one is being asked to facilitate that business - simply to use it to grab some data and save people work.
Many of those ebooks that are published through Amazon do not have ISDN numbers because the authors have not done the work of obtaining one - but those books are still valuable sources of information for researchers.
Same question, though -- why would you have an ASIN if you're not already looking at Amazon, since it's only used on one site?
I don't think the reason for not implementing proprietary identifiers is ideological -- it's the fact that supporting identifiers has real costs in terms of development, maintenance, and also potentially disambiguation between different IDs, and supporting them when they're only used in one place makes little sense. In comparison, DOIs, PMIDs, and arXiv IDs show up regularly in reference lists. ISBNs are used all over the internet in book listings (and, of course, in the book itself)
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I'm not sure why you'd have an ASIN when not already on an Amazon product page, but you can presumably just do a web search for the ASIN, click the top result, and save from there.
(Also, as Wikipedia notes, "For books with 10-digit International Standard Book Number (ISBN), the ASIN and the ISBN are the same.")
So it is an identifier that could be used to lookup metadata, which is what is being asked for - a means to import metadata into Zotero to save having to type loads of stuff manually.
I do understand that Amazon's business model may be distasteful to some, but no-one is being asked to facilitate that business - simply to use it to grab some data and save people work.
Many of those ebooks that are published through Amazon do not have ISDN numbers because the authors have not done the work of obtaining one - but those books are still valuable sources of information for researchers.
I don't think the reason for not implementing proprietary identifiers is ideological -- it's the fact that supporting identifiers has real costs in terms of development, maintenance, and also potentially disambiguation between different IDs, and supporting them when they're only used in one place makes little sense. In comparison, DOIs, PMIDs, and arXiv IDs show up regularly in reference lists. ISBNs are used all over the internet in book listings (and, of course, in the book itself)