I've been playing around with various book related sites, gems, plugins etc. in order to get my next web application up and running.
In order to get some seed data for the website (as a test), I also used Hpricot to scrape some sites, I just wanted to nod towards an amazing tool - although I'm also looking into HTTParty in this space.
The gem I settled on to get deep information on books was the Amazon ECS gem by Pluit Solutions (who are also behind BookJetty).
I'm hoping to get the site up and running in (very limited) beta soon, as I had a few days off from work last week and was able to make huge advances on it.
Please stay tuned...