In this new Did you know, we will see how to use Amazon webservices. You will be able to use cover images from Amazon’s books and see your Amazon account net every time one of your patron buy a book coming from your library’s OPAC.
To start you just have to connect on the Koha Staff Interface (username: test and password: test) and then go to Koha Administration> Global system preferences > Enhanced content.
Once on the Enhanced content tab of the system preferences, the interesting parts for today are called AmazonAssocTag, AmazonCoverImages, AmazonLocale and OPACAmazonCoverImages.
Koha offer 4 services from Amazon. The first one (AmazonAssocTag) consist in putting your Amazon’s associate tag on every link going to Amazon and therefore pay you every time a patron buys a book on Amazon. The options 2 and 4 (AmazonCoverImages) and (OPACAmazonCoverImages) allows you to choose to show or don’t show the image from Amazon on every item and the option AmazonLocale gives you the choice between 6 Amazon websites (Canada,England, France, Germany, Japan and USA).
Once the images activated and the country of origin chose, you will be able to stay in the staff interface of Koha or go back to Koha’s OPAC, to see images coming from Amazon in the search and on the item details.
If you have some complementary questions or if you just want to tell us what you think about this series, don’t hesitate to let us a comment or send me an email at pierre.vdk@biblibre.com. To read former tutorials, please follow this link: Did you know?.
See you in two weeks!
