This module offers a light-weight access to the latest version of the Amazon Product Advertising API without getting in your way.
The Amazon Product Advertising API provides programmatic access to Amazon's product selection and discovery functionality. It has search and look up capabilities, provides information on products and other features such as Reviews, Similar Products and New and Used listings.
In order to use this API you'll obviously need an Amazon Associates Web Service account for which you must with Amazon at http://aws.amazon.com. Each account contains an AWSAccessKeyId and a SecretKey.
Create a file ~/.amazon-product-api containing the following data:
[Credentials] access_key = <your access key> secret_key = <your secret key> associate_tag = <your associate id>
Here is an example how to use the API to search for books of a certain publisher:
from amazonproduct import API
api = API(locale='de')
# get all books from result set and
# print author and title
for book in api.item_search('Books', Publisher='Galileo Press'):
print '%s: "%s"' % (book.ItemAttributes.Author,
book.ItemAttributes.Title)
In the background the API will iteratively retrieve all available result pages from Amazon and return each book in turn as a lxml.objectified element.
In general, this module offers a number of convenience methods that will deal with the nitty-gritty details like error checking so you won't have to. Please refer to the extensive documentation for more details.
In order to install python-amazon-product-api you can use:
pip install python-amazon-product-api
or download the source package from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-amazon-product-api, untar it and run
python setup.py install
You'll also find binaries there to make your life easier if you happen to use a Windows system. If not, please send me an e-mail and complain loudly!
The development version is available bitbucket.org. Feel free to clone the repository and add your own features.
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/basti/python-amazon-product-api/
Patches are always welcome! Please make sure that your change does not break the tests!
This module is release under the BSD License. You can find the full text of the license in the LICENSE file.