Domains

In general, a domain is required for all requests to the API. Any request that needs to produce a list needs to know the context in which such a request is being made. The domain identifies the universe of titles that you want to be considered. In practical terms the specified value is used to restrict results using entries in the WEBDOMAINxISBN table.

What is a domain

Domain values come from the Webdomain definitions that are maintained upstream as part of MyHouse and are generally aligned with a particular public audience. For example PRH.US defines the Penguin Random House titles available for sale in the US and appropriate to be displayed on the http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com website. This may exclude ISBNs based not only on sales restriction but also based on the type of product (e.g. some downloadable materials) or who sells the product. Some domains will have significant overlap of ISBNs; some will be exclusive of each other. If there is not an existing webdomain that matches your needs, please let us know (see Contact us).

Domain required by most requests

The only types of requests that don't require a domain specification are ID lookups such as /titles/9780739359648. Since this request is just asking to return the attributes of the row in the TITLE table with id = 9780739359648, we don't need a domain to satisfy this request. And it makes sense that if you just want to know the title of an ISBN, you shouldn't need to know anything about for whom the title is available for sale. You simply want to ask the API, "Do you know anything about this ISBN?" and thus a domain isn't required.

You can specify a domain as a URL parameter like /titles/9780739359648?domain=PRH.US but it is considered canonical to specify those as sub-resources of /domains like /domains/PRH.US/titles/9780739359648. Throughout this document and examples, if a resource is mentioned like /works or /authors, it is presumed that you will prefix that with a domain specification unless you