For my own personal purposes, I have about ~300 authors (full name) of various books. I want to partition this list into "fiction authors" and "non-fiction authors". If an author writes both, then the majority gets the vote.
I looked at Amazon Product Search API: I can search by author (in Python), but there is no way to find the book category (fiction vs rest):
>>> node = api.item_search('Books', Author='Richard Dawkins')
>>> for book in node.Items.Item:
... print book.ItemAttributes.Title
What are my options? I prefer to do this in Python.
Well, you can try another service - Google Book Search API. To use Python you can have a look at gdata-python-api. In its protocol, in result feed there is a node <dc:subject> - probably that's what you need:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:openSearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/"
xmlns:gbs="http://schemas.google.com/books/2008"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms"
xmlns:gd="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005">
<id>http://www.google.com/books/feeds/volumes</id>
<updated>2008-08-12T23:25:35.000</updated>
<!-- a loot of information here, just removed those nodes to save space.. -->
<dc:creator>Jane Austen</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>James Kinsley</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Fiona Stafford</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2004</dc:date>
<dc:description>
If a truth universally acknowledged can shrink quite so rapidly into
the opinion of a somewhat obsessive comic character, the reader may reasonably feel ...
</dc:description>
<dc:format>382</dc:format>
<dc:identifier>8cp-Z_G42g4C</dc:identifier>
<dc:identifier>ISBN:0192802380</dc:identifier>
<dc:publisher>Oxford University Press, USA</dc:publisher>
<dc:subject>Fiction</dc:subject>
<dc:title>Pride and Prejudice</dc:title>
<dc:title>A Novel</dc:title>
</entry>
</feed>
Of course, this protocol gives you some overhead information, related to this book (like visible or not on Google Books etc.)