ISBN-Lookup

ISBN-Lookup is a daemon that is meant to parse incoming email, looking for ISBN numbers, ostensibly emailed from a cellphone via SMS or a PDA. It then looks up the used prices of the book on Amazon Marketplace and emails the sender back with the results. Please email me if there are any additional features you'd like to see integrated with isbn-lookup.

UPDATE: March 28,2007: I've moved the isbn-lookup server I'm running from an ancient, junky server to my own, much more faster and stable server. It should be running every two minutes. Simply send your SMS/email to josh@schmiddy.homeftp.org , formatted like so:

where the ten-digit number is the book's isbn number.

By the way, a service called ScoutPal offers roughly the exact same service, but they want you to pay them a monthly fee for the privilege.

NEW! Check out the similar project MBTA-Lookup for looking up the departure time of the next MBTA bus via SMS.

• Browse the project's CVS for a reasonably up-to-date version of isbn-lookup
• To Be Done:
  • Add support for 13-digit ISBN numbers
  • Remove crufty code that relies on system calls, stop using absolute paths
  • Test with other cell providers
• Recently accomplished:
  • Mess with email server to ensure delivery to wireless providers (arrrg!)
  • Have script truncate SMS messages to appropriate message limits
  • Added support for multiple ISBN numbers in single email
  • Added modulus check to ensure validity of ISBN #
• How you can Help:
  • Fix bugs/add features/let me know about bugs
  • Run isbn-lookup on your server for people to use
  • Feature requests?

-- Josh Kupershmidt , schmiddy~at~gmail