Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion! I do have a long list of improvements to make and I honestly can’t see this one making the list. After reviewing the documentation for ISBNdb, it’s apparent that plugin users would still have to create an account with ISBNdb.com and generate an access key similar to what Google does. So I don’t see any real advantage to hooking up to this API. It sort of adds to the complexity by adding another pedal to the bicycle, if you will, but I do certainly appreciate your suggestion.
Thx.
I believe if you compare Google’s Terms and conditions and other agreements needed to enter their developer program, vs. ISBNdb’s at http://isbndb.com/account/terms you will see a huge difference. The effort and legal implications (not to mention privacy) implications of only being able to use Google services in any WordPress plugin have become important reasons not to.
Having different choices for the source of this data is important regardless of other considerations. [OpenLibrary](https://openlibrary.org/developers) also seems like another good candidate, perhaps Archive.org would even provide funding for you to add support to their API in your plugin.
Would you consider setting up a small fundraising for this? Could you evaluate the effort required to develop this and maintain this? I know I would contribute to it, perhaps your plugin users would too.
I’ll admit, you do have me thinking, as I do see the value in hooking up to other third party APIs. I did originally look at OpenLibrary when I was deciding on which service to use, but they didn’t have nearly enough data to make it worthwhile. I’ve not looked into ISBNdb to see how robust their data is, but it’s definitely a concern I have. This was the main reason that I went with the Google Books API.
If I were to hook up to other third party services, then I would very likely not roll that functionality into the current plugin. I’m constantly trying to balance features that I think would be useful to the majority of users while minimizing code bloat and therefore performance and maintainability. That means that it’s not possible for me to incorporate every suggestion I receive.
Having said that, I would consider creating a premium plugin for this *if* there were enough demand for it. At this point, I’m not sure that there is. Besides that though, I’m also currently right in the middle of working on another premium plugin that will extend the Book Review plugin and make it easier to monetize links using Amazon. Depending on how that goes, I may add extensions for Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository etc.
If there is anyone out there who would be interested in creating an add-on for the Book Review plugin that integrates with other APIs to retrieve book info, I would be happy to work with them to add the hooks and filters necessary to facilitate this. I’ve already started doing so in version 2.1.6, but there’s still more work to be done on that front.
Thx.
