While working at Follett I always thought it was just a matter of time till Amazon turned it’s eye on the library market. Much of the web development that went on at Follett was done with an eye towards what Amazon was doing…while tailoring the experience for librarians and library book ordering/processing. The management I expressed this idea to seemed to think that Amazon wouldn’t be interested in Follett’s business. It was my opinion at the time that it would be better to have Amazon as a partner than a competitor. This is really just common sense right? No leap of intuition there.

…time passes…

Now it looks like (thanks eby) that Follett has some company. When a web savvy company like Amazon notices your niche in the ecosystem it’s definitely important to pay attention. Amazon has decided to partner with TLC and Marcive for MARC data and with OCLC to automatically update holdings. This is big news.

Somewhat related and even more interesting in some ways rsinger and eby report in #code4lib that they’ve seen Library of Congress Subject Headings and Dewey Decimal Classification Numbers in Amazon Web Service responses. For an example splice your Amazon Token in here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120913073818/http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml
?Service=AWSECommerceService
&Version=2006-06-28
&Operation=ItemLookup
&ContentType=text%2Fxml
&SubscriptionId=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE
&ItemId=097669400X
&IdType=ASIN
&ResponseGroup=ItemAttributes,Large,Subjects

scan for:

Ruby (Computer program language)