Compact Amazon Wishlists

I tend to use the wishlist feature at Amazon mostly to keep a record of books I’m interested in but aren’t necessarily ready to buy at the moment. I like to print a copy of the list to keep in my wallet for when I happen to be in a bookstore, but even the compact version of the printed wishlist tends to be too bulky.

To make a nicer layout, I put together an interface to Amazon Web Services that produces a cleanly formatted, super-compact version of a wishlist that contains only the main title of the book (without the subtitle, i.e., everything after the ubiquitous colon), the author’s name and Amazon’s current price.

Source Code

The stylesheet source and details behind its functionality are here.

View Public Wishlists by Email Address

Enter the email address known by Amazon to select the public wishlists for that user. Lists from US, UK and Canadian sites are returned.

Email Address:

This will return a page showing the wishlists on different sites, as well as links for producing the compact list (and PDF index cards.) When the list is actually printed out, only the wishlist itself is printed, not any of the site masthead, etc. View using “Print Preview” to see what the actual output would be. This can be easily trimmed with scissors and stored away for easy retrieval.

The link to the compact list can be bookmarked as it reloads the wishlist directly from Amazon each time, so it automatically stays up to date.

As an example, my public “Books” wishlist is here.

There are a few other tools I’ve been playing with here.