The 'authors' collection provides information about book authors. To retrieve corresponding books you can use 'person_id' to search in the books collection.

Note: There is currently no distinction about roles a person played in the creating of a book (author/editor/illustrator/etc). This may change in the future.

The base URL for the authors collection access is:

Arguments

name

Performs a search on the author name. For example:

/api/authors.xml?access_key=Z&index1=name&value1=atkinson+anthony

The search follows the same rules and syntax as the search on the website itself -- you can group words together using double quotes, all non-ignored words must be present in the results.

person_id

Retrieving author data by ISBNdb.com's person ID. Returns at most one match. Example:

/api/authors.xml?access_key=Z&index1=person_id&value1=anthony_a_atkinson

Results

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ISBNdb server_time="2006-01-22T20:51:46">
 <AuthorList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
  <AuthorData person_id="anthony_a_atkinson">
   <Name>Anthony A. Atkinson</Name>
  </AuthorData>
 </AuthorList>
</ISBNdb>

In addition to common 'results' blocks the book authors collection adds some that are authors specific. The syntax remains the same -- comma separated values in the 'results' argument.

details

Shows more details about the author. For example:

/api/authors.xml?access_key=Z&results=details&index1=person_id&value1=anthony_a_atkinson

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ISBNdb server_time="2006-01-22T20:56:03">
 <AuthorList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
  <AuthorData person_id="anthony_a_atkinson">
   <Name>Anthony A. Atkinson</Name>
   <Details first_name="Anthony" last_name="Atkinson" dates="" has_books="1" />
  </AuthorData>
 </AuthorList>
</ISBNdb>

categories

Shows a list of categories this author is listed in. Typically, this shows only one category where authors are listed alphabetically.

/api/authors.xml?access_key=Z&results=categories&index1=person_id&value1=anthony_a_atkinson

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ISBNdb server_time="2006-01-22T21:00:16">
 <AuthorList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
  <AuthorData person_id="anthony_a_atkinson">
   <Name>Anthony A. Atkinson</Name>
   <Categories>
    <Category category_id="alphabetically.authors.a.n">N</Category>
   </Categories>
  </AuthorData>
 </AuthorList>
</ISBNdb>

subjects

Shows a list of subjects this author has books about. You can then search for books data using 'subject_id' as a key.

/api/authors.xml?access_key=Z&results=subjects&index1=person_id&value1=anthony_a_atkinson

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ISBNdb server_time="2006-01-22T21:10:52">
 <AuthorList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
  <AuthorData person_id="anthony_a_atkinson">
   <Name>Anthony A. Atkinson</Name>
   <Subjects>
    <Subject subject_id="managerial_accounting" book_count="11">
     Managerial accounting
    </Subject>
    <Subject subject_id="income_tax_reform" book_count="2">
     Income tax, Reform
    </Subject>
   </Subjects>
  </AuthorData>
 </AuthorList>
</ISBNdb>