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Re: Phht! on screenscaping

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On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:09:31 -0300, Arved Sandstrom
<asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

>Besides, assuming it was legal, *Roedy* could offer the API as a
>service. He's the aggregating screenscraper, does all the heavy-lifting,
>and other people can query *his* web service

there are all kinds of companies doing just that, though they don't
think of themselves that way.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/bookstores.html

There are many services that let you find out which bookstores carry a
given book.  If you order through them, they get a finder's fee.

They have my problem magnified many times, since they may be polling
200+ bookstores.  I poll only 20.

If we had a common API to get info about a book from a store, this
programming task would be trivial and would not require constant
maintenance. Further, it would not fail in production.  No bookstore
gives any warning that is changing the format of its pages, or is
adding or changing wordings.

Further, you would not need to deal with many languages in your code.

It would not be that hard to come up with a format of the file and an
API to fetch it, and even write a sample client and server app. The
hard part is political, selling it.  Perhaps Google might ask its
customers to implement it, or the ISBN people.

Perhaps somebody has already done that. It would just take inquiries
to bookstore asking them the URL to access the XXX API.

-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
It should not be considered an error when the user starts something
already started or stops something already stopped. This applies
to browsers, services, editors... It is inexcusable to 
punish the user by requiring some elaborate sequence to atone,
e.g. open the task editor, find and kill some processes.

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Thread

Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-09-30 09:04 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:10 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:24 -0700
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:30 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:40 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:19 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:21 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-09-30 22:53 -0300
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 22:11 -0400
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-01 09:09 -0300
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-10-01 15:48 -0400
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Movable Hype <mhype101@snortwad.net> - 2011-10-02 03:40 +0000
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-02 10:20 -0300
            Re: Phht! on screenscaping Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-10-02 08:43 -0700
              Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-10-02 16:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-10-02 12:11 +0000
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:03 -0700

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