Release the Stars!

June 2, 2009 11:37 AM

Where might I find a list of Publishers Weekly's starred reviews?

I'm not always one to trust PW's judgement of every book I ever buy, but I will say that if I notice a book I'm interested in on Amazon has a starred review from PW, I'm at least a little more intrigued in reading it.

Which lead me to wanting to find a list of the books that PW has given starred reviews to, preferably one that's updated on a regular basis.

However, my Google-fu has failed me. It would seem that I could look through a number of reviews on PW's site, but, manually culling through them doesn't exactly get me what or where I want, not to mention the fact that I don't think they even allow (free) access to their archived reviews.

So, MeFites, does anyone know of a place out there to find such information?

posted by mrhaydel to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I'm not sure you'll find a list somewhere on the internet, but you can search Amazon for Publishers Weekly Starred Review The links on the left sidebar will help narrow it down by category depending on what you're interested in (including new releases and soon to be released books). That's probably your best bet.
posted by bluefly at 6:26 PM on June 2 [1 favorite]

I can't find a way to get just the starred reviews. However, you can get an RSS feed of the reviews, and of course the starred ones are marked. I might make a go at playing with it in Yahoo pipes and seeing if I can filter out the starred reviews.
posted by timepiece at 7:24 AM on June 3

OK, this is the best feed I could come up with. The data is from Google Base, which Amazon and other booksellers list their books on. Unfortunately, because that data is formatted for a shopping comparison search, I can't filter by category (like leaving out children's books, for instance, or self-help), or by publication date, so it's not going to be a feed of recently published books (I don't think - maybe after it's been running for a few days only new stuff will show up).

Since it's a published feed, you can copy it and try messing with it yourself. I guess you could filter by publishers (which are included, unlike pub date), which would probably let you eliminate most children's. If you would rather only link to Amazon pages, you could limit by item author as well (author here meaning author of the listing, not the book).

Uh, if you want anything but an RSS feed, I got nothin'. The Amazon search mentioned above does work, but then you'd have to manually run it every so often.
posted by timepiece at 10:53 AM on June 3

Man, you guys are phenomenal.

Actually, I really like both options.

I'll subscribe to the feed and go through it as items arrive, and then use the Amazon search for when I want something targeted.

Thank you, yet again, Hive Mind.
posted by mrhaydel at 6:53 PM on June 3