Answers.Body: <p>I am not aware if it is such a tool/service/API, and generally publishers don't offer APIs IMHO mainly because copyright infringement sites or concurrent businesses might use them.</p>
  
  <p>So you need to take a custom approach, using URL because most of the sites use GET method to do their queries and do some data-mining using scripts (wget/selenium etc).</p>
  
  <p>You could do like this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Search for exact text in google</p>
  
  <p>ex search:</p>
  
  <p>"Numerical boundaries take many forms but are always applied in finite games. Persons are selected for finite play."</p></li>
  <li><p>Look for ISBN in resulted pages or for title and author using regular expressions or CSS selectors, XPATH etc.</p></li>
  <li><p>Search using advanced query on amazon or other site:
  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-isbn=1476731713" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-isbn=1476731713</a></p>
  
  <p>notice <code>&amp;field-isbn=1476731713</code> same could be used for <code>&amp;field-author=</code> or <code>&amp;field-title=</code> </p>
  
  <p>Use regular expressions to extract all the book data.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>This would be my approach.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2013-12-25T13:05:20.780Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2013-12-25T13:05:20.780Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Eduard Florinescu
Body: <p>I know that these days, there are services (I think Google provides one) that can take a "digital fingerprint" of a song, and help you catalogue that song, e.g. composer/band/genre/year.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a similar service for books, where it would, based on text snippets, automatically tell you the author/title/year/ISBN?</p>
  
  <p>Don't care if the service is packaged as a "book cataloging" app or merely a per-single-book API that I can use in my own software.</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-20T19:24:27.107Z
Comments.Text: +1 An interesting question, although typically just searching online will yield the book name if it is sufficiently popular.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Nathan Osman
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-20T19:28:13.307Z
Comments.Text: @NathanOsman - I'm interested in something that can be used from within a program, as opposed to requiring my own eyeballs and result-choice heuristics like random Google search would.
Comments.UserDisplayName: DVK
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-23T22:37:28.460Z
Comments.Text: I'd search for a plagiarism checker/detector service.
Comments.UserDisplayName: palacsint
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-23T22:50:40.107Z
Comments.Text: @palacsint - interesting hack!
Comments.UserDisplayName: DVK
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-24T14:56:26.967Z
Comments.Text: I can see copyright laws preventing a single source storing all the text for [all/most] books. Maybe some of the big players can come together and provide such a service.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Jason Down
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-24T15:08:05.983Z
Comments.Text: @JasonDown - you don't need to store all the text. Just signatures (think the services that identify MP3 for you from sound signature; or Google's thing that automatically detects copyrighted material on Youtube)
Comments.UserDisplayName: DVK
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-24T15:12:32.263Z
Comments.Text: Yes that makes sense. When you said based on text snippets, I was thinking thinking you meant based on any text snippet within the document.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Jason Down
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2013-12-25T02:01:25.820Z
Comments.Text: This would be cool if it existed (hopeful!) @palacsint may be on to something.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Shimmy Hacked
Tags: <metadata><cataloguing>
Title: Are there ways to automatically detect what book an e-text is?
UserDisplayName: DVK
ThreadText: # Are there ways to automatically detect what book an e-text is?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2013-12-20)
  
  I know that these days, there are services (I think Google provides one) that can take a "digital fingerprint" of a song, and help you catalogue that song, e.g. composer/band/genre/year.
  
  Is there a similar service for books, where it would, based on text snippets, automatically tell you the author/title/year/ISBN?
  
  Don't care if the service is packaged as a "book cataloging" app or merely a per-single-book API that I can use in my own software.
  
  **Tags:** metadata, cataloguing
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: +1 An interesting question, although typically just searching online will yield the book name if it is sufficiently popular.  
  > **username_0**: @username_1 - I'm interested in something that can be used from within a program, as opposed to requiring my own eyeballs and result-choice heuristics like random Google search would.  
  > **username_2**: I'd search for a plagiarism checker/detector service.  
  > **username_0**: @username_2 - interesting hack!  
  > **username_3**: I can see copyright laws preventing a single source storing all the text for [all/most] books. Maybe some of the big players can come together and provide such a service.  
  > **username_0**: @username_3 - you don't need to store all the text. Just signatures (think the services that identify MP3 for you from sound signature; or Google's thing that automatically detects copyrighted material on Youtube)  
  > **username_3**: Yes that makes sense. When you said based on text snippets, I was thinking thinking you meant based on any text snippet within the document.  
  > **username_4**: This would be cool if it existed (hopeful!) @username_2 may be on to something.  
  
  ---
  
  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_5 on 2013-12-25. Score: 3
  
  I am not aware if it is such a tool/service/API, and generally publishers don't offer APIs IMHO mainly because copyright infringement sites or concurrent businesses might use them.
  
  So you need to take a custom approach, using URL because most of the sites use GET method to do their queries and do some data-mining using scripts (wget/selenium etc).
  
  You could do like this:
  
  1. Search for exact text in google
  
     ex search:
  
     "Numerical boundaries take many forms but are always applied in finite games. Persons are selected for finite play."
  2. Look for ISBN in resulted pages or for title and author using regular expressions or CSS selectors, XPATH etc.
  3. Search using advanced query on amazon or other site:
     <http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-isbn=1476731713>
  
     notice `&field-isbn=1476731713` same could be used for `&field-author=` or `&field-title=`
  
     Use regular expressions to extract all the book data.
  
  This would be my approach.
  
  
  ---
  
  