feature request: ISBN retrieval

[Hugo-Heagren]

I don't really use biblio itself, but it serves as an incredibly powerful backend for stuff in ebib, which I use a lot. A while ago I raised this issue, requesting support for importing by ISBN in ebib (which can currently import by doi, thanks to biblio).

This would require general support for ISBN fetching in biblio, so as a first step I'm offering to try implementing that. As I said, I don't use biblio itself much, and don't know the internals very well, but I would expect to start by porting biblio-doi.el to fetch isbns instead and work from there? I thought this api looked promising, but since there is no 'canonical' source of information for isbns (unlike for dois), I would want to include some facility for users to customize the source of the bibliographic information for isbn retrieval.

How does all that sound?

[nicolas-graves]

Hi !
I haven't looked into that myself yet, but I noticed that there is already a library that tackled the issue here : https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/a65e3020759ca695c843965295f43d5f3e4fe6c3/org-ref-isbn.el

[fabcontigiani]

Hi! Recently took a crack at providing a feature like this while leveraging the extensibility utilities present in biblio, and here's the result: biblio-openlibrary

I'm a complete noob when it comes to elisp, so all feedback is welcome. Also, I've decided to keep it a separated package, following the advice from other PRs that aim at extending biblio's functionality (#50 #60). I would be open to publish on MELPA once I feel the package is more mature and has been tested more thoroughly.

Hope you find it useful!