bookshops 0.1

# Web scraping to get book informations

This library is to get book informations. We can search with keywords, with the isbn, with an advanced search, and do pagination.

We get the data from existing websites. We scrape:

• for French books, http://www.librairie-de-paris.fr (at first Decitre, but it’s less complete)

• for Spain: http://www.casadellibro.com

• for Germany: the site went down ! This is the danger of webscraping.

we get: the title and authors, the price, the publisher(s), the cover, etc

<img src=”cli-search.png”</img>

## Import data from an ods or csv file

If your file has an ‘isbn’ and a ‘quantity’ column, it’s easy, we will find all the book information.

If it has the title and the publisher, it’s doable but error prone. We can still do it, but you shall do an inventory of your stock afterwards.

See the odsimport module. It gives back a json. It’s your responsibility to add what you want in your database (this is done in Abelujo).

Usable, but work in progress.

### Accepted format and columns

We can read ods and csv files.

• a file with an “isbn” and “quantity” column,

• a file with columns “title”, “publisher”, “isbn” (optionnal in this case), “shelf”, “distributor”, “quantity”. There is no “price” column. “authors” is optionnal (it can help to fetch the correct book).

If the file has no headers, use the “odsettings.py” configuration file (in particular, to set the csv delimiter, either “,” or “;”).

## Why not Amazon ?

Amazon kills the book industry and its employees. But moreover, with can link to a good and independent bookshop from within the application, and… we learn a lot in doing this !

## Why not Google books ?

It has very few data.

## Why not the BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) ?

Because, for bookshops, we need recent books (the BNF takes a few months), up to date information. There isn’t a lot of tools either.

# Install

This lib isn’t on pypi yet.

It is usable, but not mature.

It’s used as a git submodule at Abelujo https://gitlab.com/vindarel/abelujo

# Use

So, for now you need to clone this repo.

To try it out, go to a scraper directory:

cd frFR/librairiedeparis/ python librairiedeparisScraper.py 9782918059363

and you get the above screenshot.

## Advanced search

Work in progress.

You can search ed:agone to search for a specific publisher.

## Pagination

We do pagination.

# Develop and test

See http://dev.abelujo.cc/webscraping.html

# Bugs and shortcomings

This is webscraping, so it doesn’t go without pitfalls:

• the site can go down. It happened already.

• the site can change, it which case we would have to change our sraper too. This can be catched early with automated and frequent tests (work ongoing).