It's an unfortunate restriction but it is definitely not a "recent change" as the article suggests. It was in their T&C's at least six months ago, I recall seeing it while prototyping an iPhone app that used the Amazon API for some things.

If you're a developer who's only just noticed this after months of work then that sucks, but don't try to portray it as a malicious act of Amazon against your project.

I'm sorry but building your business on another business's data without explicit permission from them is just setting yourself up for this kind of thing.

It's kinda funny that in the 90's, "web masters" wanted search engine crawlers to ask for permission to crawl their site.

Right now, there's no economic advantage to sharing your data--especially in this case where Amazon is trying to protect its investment in the Kindle and its impending "App Store" for books.

Perhaps when we have a way for published data to benefit the publisher, we won't have stuff like this going on.

To clarify a little the Delicious App does have explicit permission to use the data but only for the desktop version.

I work on a similar product (Beep My Stuff) and to be honest Amazon's data while far from perfect is the only real source.

The interesting thing from my point of view is that the Delicious Library iPhone app doesn't make Amazon API calls for ISBNs. It synchronized with the desktop version of Delicious Library, which gets its information from the Amazon API. So the headline is pretty carefully written, they're killing mobile apps that use their data.

Source: http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/2517998206

I have noticed the restriction for mobile services in Amazon's TOS about two years ago.

From the comments on that article, this is apparently nothing new:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/amazon-killing-web-serv...

Isn't there some other bookstore that the data can be gleaned from? A google search would also probably work.