On Saturday, Jan 4, 2003, at 14:27 US/Central, Pat Eyler wrote:

> Second (and maybe interesting to more people), they recently saw Tim
> O'Reilly using some numbers culled from Amazon services.  They'd like 
> to
> get their own tool for doing amazon.com based research.  Since I work 
> for
> amazon, and can't really write a program like this for conflict of
> interest reasons, I recommended that they hire someone to write the 
> tool
> for them (in Ruby).  Clay said that I could go ahead and post a 
> request.
> If anyone is interested in taking him up on this, let me know and I'll 
> get
> you contact information (it may take until Monday for me to get back to
> you, my weekend is pretty full).
>
FWIW, I've already got a script that culls sales ranks off Amazon. It 
copes with the western and japanese page formats.

Also, as Manning is (ie believe) part of Pearson, I think they could 
probably ask Mike Hendrickson over at AWL for a copy of the code he 
uses: it draws lots of pretty graphs too... :)


Cheers


Dave