Get Book Details by ISBN with the Google Books API

The Google Books API can return details of any book from the ISBN code. You get to know the book title, author names, publishing date, publisher and so on.

You don’t need any keys to use the Google Books API and the details are sent in JSON format that can be fetch using Google Apps Script. This can be achieved with the Amazon API as well but would that would take more more since you would need to get the Access keys from the AWS dashboard.

function getBookDetails(isbn) {
  // Query the book database by ISBN code.
  isbn = isbn || '9781451648546'; // Steve Jobs book

  var url = 'https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:' + isbn;

  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url);
  var results = JSON.parse(response);

  if (results.totalItems) {
    // There'll be only 1 book per ISBN
    var book = results.items[0];

    var title = book['volumeInfo']['title'];
    var subtitle = book['volumeInfo']['subtitle'];
    var authors = book['volumeInfo']['authors'];
    var printType = book['volumeInfo']['printType'];
    var pageCount = book['volumeInfo']['pageCount'];
    var publisher = book['volumeInfo']['publisher'];
    var publishedDate = book['volumeInfo']['publishedDate'];
    var webReaderLink = book['accessInfo']['webReaderLink'];

    // For debugging
    Logger.log(book);
  }
}
Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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