Amazon web services allow you to search the Amazon catalogue and see which other books are 'similar to' a book you happen to be looking at.... If you don' know what I mean, find a book on Amazon, look for the "Explore similar items" link and follow it, then come back here...
You may have seen some of my other book search pages (e.g. OUseful Course Book Search) which allow you to search OU course titles and the titles of self-purchased books on OU courses for a particular keyword. An obvious extension to this is to have a book search page that also pops up a box saying This book is used on this OU course, if that happens to be the case... But it's not very likely that many people will be searching specifically for a book that happens to be on an OU course, so it's not very likely that they would ever be alerted to any course that uses that book...
This page widens the net by allowing you to look up a book (by its ISBN), pull down the list of similar items (according to Amazon) and then check to see if any of those similar items are used on an OU course...
Want to see an example? Tim Berners-Lee's book "Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web" has the ISBN 1587990180 (check details...). Want a quick look at the similar items link?
Some good books, there... I wonder if any are used on OU courses? Any similar courses that may appeal to people who read Weaving the web??
The current search goes to depth 1 i.e. we just check to see if there are items similar to the focus item, though we could go further (depth 2 would also check every item that was similar to every book that was similar to the original....)
Want to try some others?
That art one's quite interesting...to what extent do OU courses either influence - or reflect - popular buying..? There's probably a research project in there somewhere...
If you know the ISBN of a book, click one of the above links and hack the URL, replacing the current ISBN with your own choice (though I give no guarantees that it will work...) <<<< No need to do that any more....:
If there is any interest in this service, i could tidy it up, add a search box etc... Otherwise, it shall just remain an idle curiosity...
The Amazon web services also offer other things that may be useful, like the popoularity (sales rank) of course books, or books that are similar to course books. The degrees of separation between popular books and given OU course books etc... Toys for another evening's play , perhaps...
The page loading speed continues to be a problem - something to do with the SOAP proxy i think.... all the OUseful pages should be recoded in a RESTful way, really, but not just now...