Bookmancy

Overview

Bookmancy is a small module to scrape abebooks.com search results and ebay book search results for consumption in a node environment.

Install

npm i @dillonchr/bookmancy

abe - AbeBooks search

abe({author, title, publisher, format, year, includeUrl})

• title - String - The title of the book
• author - String - The author or editor of the book. Basically anything that a seller would potentially put as the author.
• publisher - String - The name of the publisher
• format - String - options include [hardback, hardcover, softcover, paperback, h, p]
• year - Number - Four digit year, filters books published <=year
• includeUrl - Boolean - optional, will append a url prop to the response object for continuing the search manually

Returns

{
    results: [
        <BookResult>...
    ]
}

Example

const bookmancy = require('bookmancy');
bookmancy.abe({author: 'August Derleth', publisher: 'Mycroft'}, (err, data) => {
    console.log(err || data.results.length);
});

Returns (with includeUrl: true option)

{
    url: 'https://abebooks...',
    retults: [
        <BookResult>...
    ]
}

ebay - ebay Search

REQUIRES ebay API key

All ebay requests take place with their actual API. So you will need to register to add an application and get your keys. Once you have your key you will need to be sure to include the key in your project's .env file:

EBAY_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Failure to include this key will result in all search calls throwing an error highlighting that this step must be completed.

ebay({author, title, publisher, year, sold, live})

• title - String - The title of the book
• author - String - The author or editor of the book. Basically anything that a seller would potentially put as the author.
• publisher - String - The name of the publisher
• year - Number - Four digit year, filters books published <=year
• sold - Boolean - search for sold listings
• live - Boolean - search for live listings

Note: author, title, publisher, year will be joined with spaces and searched against the API. eBay doesn't have a way to search for specific authors, titles, publishers, or publication years.

The sold and live properties are booleans. If you omit both, then the results returned will be from both sold and live listing searches. Otherwise whichever ones are true will be searched and returned.

Returns

{
    results: [
        <BookResult>...
    ]
}

Example

const bookmancy = require('bookmancy');
bookmancy.ebay({author: 'August Derleth', publisher: 'Mycroft'}, (err, data) => {
    console.log(err || data.results.length);
});

BookResult - Not available on export, but is the structure for results from both searches

• about - String - The description from the listing
• price - String - Unformatted price
• shipping - String|Null - Unformatted shipping price
• image - String|Null - URL for photo
• year - String|Null - Year work was published in listing
• sold - Boolean - (ebay only) if listing sold or is no longer for sale
• url - String - URL to view item listing
• date - Timestamp - (ebay only) when listing/auction expires