Downloading ISBN record details to my online shopify bookstore

Topic summary

A Shopify bookstore owner with nearly 2,000 books seeks to automate product creation using ISBN numbers instead of manually copying descriptions and uploading images for each book. The manual process is time-consuming and repetitive.

Proposed Solutions:

  • Custom app development using book catalogue APIs (Google Books API, Goodreads API, Open Library)
  • Paid ISBN database services like ISBNdb.com
  • Desktop utilities using Open Library data dumps with CSV import to Shopify
  • Book collector software like LibIB or Collectorz with barcode scanning capabilities

Key Considerations:

  • The original poster tested downloading from Indiebound.org but abandoned it due to conflicts with existing records
  • They later realized that having fewer, carefully curated book listings with quality content performs better than maintaining thousands of records

Resolution:
A developer (Cristina_92) released “ISBNExpress: Book Importer,” a Shopify app specifically designed for this purpose. The app retrieves book details from ISBNs and offers 50 free product creations upon installation. Multiple other bookstore owners expressed interest in similar solutions throughout the discussion.

Summarized with AI on November 16. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

@quay-books Crudest approach is if your good with access or excel, the openlibrary maintains a data dump of book info in tab separated format you could use to put together a local desktop utility that you then export to CSV to then import into shopify’s product CSV import. Then when that’s working you try and move that process to something like googlesheets and connect an automator service like zapier to shopify.

https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps

Or a paid database services like https://isbndb.com/isbn-database .

Or seeing if you can co-opt book collector software like https://www.collectorz.com or https://www.libib.com/pricing to hobble together the workflow you you need (has a kiosk mode barcode scanner thing? /shrug)

There’s also the AWS ECommerceService if your an amazon bookseller, or amazon affiliate.

Otherwise the app needs to be developed and there is actually a lot of moving parts in getting quality ISBN data.