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Amazon Product Advertising API and Kindle Edition Books

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Update: January 23, 2010 8:00am MDT
NovelRank now offers Kindle book tracking again! http://www.novelrank.com/blog/tracking-kindle-sales-rank-book-tracker-available/

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As of 11pm EDT on August 13th, 2009, some problems have been creeping up in the interactions with the Amazon API. NovelRank uses the API to gather Sales Rank data about paperbacks, hardcovers, and kindle edition books. First the problem was 1 book (the first one ever added), then an hour later 2… 24 hours later, all Kindle Edition books tracked by NovelRank are not returning any SalesRank numbers.

There is an erroneous error being returned by Amazon:
AWS.ECommerceService.ItemNotAccessible

Originally I suspected a bug, but as the day has moved on, it looks like a deliberate move by Amazon to no longer make Kindle book information (SalesRank specifically) available. I’ve posted in their forums and will continue to try and get some word from Amazon on the status. It would be unfortunate if this was blocked, since many authors don’t have direct access to the sales numbers provided by Amazon for Kindle books unless they are self-published and added it themselves rather than their publisher.

Hopefully more info will come soon. Till then, current Sales Rank for Kindle Edition books will be shown as 0. I’ll keep trying; let’s hope it works out for the better.

Update: August 19, 2009 2:16pm MDT
It seems Kindle Edition books are also not being returned via the API ‘ItemLookup’ either. Kindle Edition books are being completely blocked. Tested with an ASIN based ItemLookup. No response or word from Amazon on the forums at all.

Update: September 30, 2009 7:29pm MDT
Aaron Shepard over at SalesRankExpress has called it quits on Amazon Kindle books through the API, and has proposed a theory as to why on on his blogin the Sept. 20th post. He’s also updated it with the same update I’m about to give: Amazon, without explanation, has confirmed this to be permanent. For now, Kindle Edition books will no longer be added to NovelRank and hopefully in the next few months, I’ll write all new code to add Kindle Edition books as well as scrape Amazon.com for SalesRank. This will take a notable amount of work, so it will be pushed off till the future. Sorry folks, this is frustrating for me as well as an author of a paperback and Kindle book.

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Sales Rank Tracking Widget Created!

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

SalesRank Widget

It’s the little things… There is now a widget for pulling in your current Amazon.com Sales Rank from NovelRank. This allows the viewers of your book blog (that you of course have to promote your book) to quickly track your sales rank and see how your book is performing! On each of the detail pages for books you’ll find the snippet, but here is a basic example of one:

<script src="http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X"
type="text/javascript" ></script>
<noscript>
<a href='http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0470325070'>Amazon Sales Rank</a>
by NovelRank</noscript>

You’ll notice inside the src tag in the beginning it ends with the ASIN number for the book (which is also used for the details page):

http://www.novelrank.com/asin/143571590X

Just change that code for your books ASIN and it will now pull down the results for that book! There is also a currently secret flag you can add to disable all the default styling (for those who want to apply their own CSS to the embedded code). After the ASIN code and before the double quotation mark, add the following:

&styles=false

Thus the new link under the src tag would be:

http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X&styles=false

Here is the HTML that was dynamically created by the widget and is written to your page when you use the above code:

<div id="novelrank">
<p class="nr_title">Amazon Sales Rank:</p>
<p class="nr_salesrank">833,704</p>
<p style="display: block !important; visibility: visible !important;" class="nr_tag"><a href="http://www.novelrank.com/">Sales Rank</a> by NovelRank.com</p>
</div>

Update: September 22, 2009

You can now specify the domain you wish to use! Just like the &styles=false example above, you can append the following:

&domain=uk

OR

&domain=ca

The default (if nothing is specified) is Amazon.com, but using the above values you can now have a widget for each domain NovelRank tracks!

Update: October 31, 2009

Three more domains now available:

&domain=fr
&domain=de
&domain=jp

Update October 5, 2010

Sample code of an embed using the UK domain addition:

<script src="http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X&domain=uk"
type="text/javascript" ></script>
<noscript>
<a href='http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0470325070'>Amazon Sales Rank</a>
by NovelRank</noscript>

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