The Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) is a unique identification number assigned by Amazon.com and its partners for product identification within the Amazon. With reference to a given (possibly implicit set of objects a unique identifier is any Identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects Amazoncom Inc ( is an American electronic commerce ( E-commerce) company in Seattle Washington. com organization. ^[1]

Each product sold on Amazon. com is given a unique ASIN. For books with 10-digit ISBN, the ASIN and the ISBN are the same. Books without an ISBN and other products are also assigned ASINs. ASINs are also used for other items used by Amazon. com (and subsidiaries), such as businesses in the yellow pages (on A9.com) and OpenSearch feeds. A9com, which went live on April 14, 2004, is an Internet Search engine from Amazon OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation.

Proponents of the free culture movement such as Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, have criticized the ASIN as an example of a proprietary product identifier, arguing that it draws producers—especially smaller ones—into a lock-in with Amazon, and proposed the creation of an open alternative where producers could register product IDs for a marginal fee without proprietary control, and the resulting databases would be available under a free license. The free culture movement is a Social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify Creative works, using the Internet as well as other ***************************************************************************************** * * Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7 1966 is an American Internet entrepreneur known The word proprietary indicates that a party or proprietor exercises private Ownership, control or use over an item of Property. In Economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products _____ __ / ___/ / /_ ____ ____ \__ \ / __/ / __ \ / __ \ ___/ / / /_ ^[2]

ASIN in Amazon URLs

On Amazon's USA-targeted web site, a product's web address (URL) always contains its ASIN in the format of:

http://amazon. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it com/gp/product/ASIN-VALUE-HERE

The former format was http://amazon. com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/ASIN-VALUE-HERE.

Therefore the URL on Amazon for the paperback of Strunk, White, and Roger Angell's The Elements of Style, 4th Edition, whose ISBN is 020530902X, is:

http://amazon. William Strunk Jr (July 1 1869 Cincinnati Ohio &ndash September 26 1946 Ithaca New York) was Professor of English at Cornell University and is Elwyn Brooks "E B" White ( July 11, 1899 – October 1 1985) was an American writer Roger Angell (born September 19, 1920) is a fiction editor and regular contributor at The New Yorker. The Elements of Style ( Strunk & White) is an American English Writing Style guide. com/gp/product/020530902X

A shorter form of the URL for most products is:

http://amazon. com/o/ASIN/ASIN-VALUE-HERE

An even shorter form of the URL is:

http://amazon. com/dp/ASIN-VALUE-HERE (dp="detail page")

So the URL for Elements of Style, 4th Edition would become:

http://amazon. com/o/ASIN/020530902X

Similar URLs can be constructed for Amazon sites in other countries, such as:

http://amazon. co. uk/o/ASIN/020530902X

http://amazon. de/o/ASIN/020530902X

http://amazon. fr/o/ASIN/020530902X

However, not all sites carry all titles—e. g. ASIN 393206402X is only available on the German version of Amazon.

See also

• Kimba Kano: A browser add-on for built-in ISBN and ASIN searching.

References

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