Short Links for Your Books

Just a little reference post for those who deal with making links for books, like I, and many of my friends, do.

Each site has a long, complicated URL for your title… but most also have a short, nice looking one too.

Amazon

Amazon will add the entire text to the Magna Charta onto your URL if you don’t watch it.

LampLight, Volume 3, issue 1, Kindle:

http://smile.amazon.com/LampLight-3-Issue-Yvonne-Navarro-ebook/dp/B00NPJY10I/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411750626&sr=1-1

LampLight, Volume 3, issue 1, print:

http://smile.amazon.com/LampLight-3-Issue-Yvonne-Navarro/dp/1502431580/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411744718&sr=8-1&keywords=1502431580

The easiest way to get a good link is to click the email link in the share option, and just copy the link from there. You can make it as such:

For Kindle:

amazon.com/dp/(ASIN)

Where you get your ASIN from the product details.

For Print:

amazon.com/dp/(ISBN 10)

In both cases, you’ll see the number you need in the URL, next to the DP.

so, for our examples, we have the following:

Kindle:

http://.amazon.com/dp/B00NPJY10I

Print:

http://amazon.com/dp/1502431580

Barnes and Noble

barnesandnoble.com is already a long URL, add on the remainder, and it gets a bit unwieldy.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lamplight-jacob-haddon/1118943137?ean=2940044832688

But that’s ok! There is also BN.com. Add on a short cut, and you can get nice, clean URLs for your books:

bn.com/s/(BN ID)

Which is that ean= number at the end of the URL, so for this example:

http://bn.com/s/2940044832688

For your print book, the formula is the same, just one detail is different—the EAN number is your ISBN-13, not the BN ID

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lamplight-volume-1-issue-1-jacob-haddon/1117505311?ean=9781493585915&itm=1&usri=9781493585915

reduces to:

http://bn.com/s/9781493585915

Kobo and Smashwords

Unfortunately, neither of these has a good way of doing links. For both, simply copy the link for the book.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/258702

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/lamplight-vol-i-issue-2

iBooks

Apple presents a few challenges for links with its iTunes store. Thankfully, they have a link maker—just search for your title and poof!

http://itunes.apple.com/linkmaker/

So, not nice and tidy, but they are easier to find, at least. These links will go direct to iTunes if installed, or show a web view if not.

Updated – 2024 Feb

removed references to AMZN.com as they no longer work. Now updating all my old websites…

Author: jake

poet, editor, kilt wearing heathen. he/him