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Without getting into amazon's policies, they do have a very large database of bibliographic information. And with their new web services interface, there is a very easy way of accessing this information.
I've experimented with using Amazon as my data source for the current version of Thokbook. Using Net::Amazon, I've found it very simple to use. You just make a query with an ISBN, and you receive back an object with all the data that you need.
However, they do not want you cache that data for longer than 24 hours, which makes things inconvenient.
So, future versions of Thokbook may go back to using Z39.50 servers.
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