How To Get Amazon Book Cover Images for My Site?

March 31, 2009 8:50 AM

I want to put some code on my site (Wordpress) displaying images of books and other Amazon products, and link the images, with my Associates key, back to Amazon. Amazon offers several ways to do this. I don't like them. A batch of WP plugins offer to do this, but the ones I've tested are all overkill, if they actually work. I can handle the code, but where do I get the images? I've seen a few sites that pull book cover images from a secure image site at Amazon. How does that work?
posted by justcorbly to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Maybe you could grab them from another site, like Powell's Books, that stores them by ISBN? If you go this route, please copy the images to your own server, though. It would suck if Powell's had to pay every time you used an image of theirs to sell a book off Amazon.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:03 AM on March 31

I've found this useful.
posted by Knappster at 9:44 AM on March 31

Amazon book covers are easy to get.
Go to the book, click on the cover to get a larger image, right click to get the image "properties" and there's the link to the image itself. Resize it in your code to the height and width you want, and hey presto, you got it.
Amazon does not mind this hot linking to their images.
posted by willmize at 9:48 AM on March 31

You do want an automatic solution, right? Not something where you yourself have to go retrieve the image every time? (That's why I was suggesting something where the only variable is the ISBN. I don't have the coding chops to create a script myself, but I'm sure it's not hard.)
posted by ocherdraco at 10:05 AM on March 31

Amazon have a web-service for doing this.
posted by gregjones at 10:39 AM on March 31