Otis ’s Comments (group member since Sep 02, 2008)

Otis ’s comments from the Goodreads Developers group.

Great to hear Daniel! We aren't building one of those ourselves for some time.

An announcement will be coming soon. Sheesh Michael!

Pretty sure we implemented this for bookcrossing.com - let me know if you can't figure it out!

Can you point to an example of a page that shows the bug? Am not following what is broken.

Our API can only give out data that we have rights to give out, and unfortunately a lot of our meta-data comes from Amazon or B&N and we don't have license to give it our in our API. If you need it you will have to get it straight from them as well. Unfortunate, I know!

I'm a little wary of opening that method up into the API as the potential for abuse, or just for cluttering up our database of books, is high. Perhaps we could do it with a white-list.

How many books are there that you haven't been able to add?

Hmm. I think perhaps we should reword the terms to say that you can store the authenticated users data for longer periods of time. That should be fine.

By the way, I noticed your app must live - congrats! Is there a public page we can link to it from somewhere?

We define commercial as if you are charging someone to use your app. So if it's free to download/use and you are just monetizing on ads or affiliate, you are fine.

Yes - many of our book descriptions come from amazon and we aren't - per their terms - allowed to give those to third parties. You can get them yourself from amazons API though.

However it's worth noting that we are interested in developing it soon - as Amazon data comes with very restrictive rules!

Great point, and thank you so much for pointing that out. I am revising the API terms to say:

"You may store information obtained from the Goodreads API for up to 24 hours. Goodreads needs the ability to modify, remove, and update the order of our data, which caching would prevent. An exception to this rule is if the data is from your own account—as you own that data you may store it permanently."

Basically according to our regular websites terms any data you enter into Goodreads is your data - we just have a license to display it - so it's yours to do with as you please.

We can add this - it would be cool actually.

After the next release you can use a new undocumented API call:

http://www.goodreads.com/group/member...

Two new methods have been added to the API:

1. user.show: get information about a user by id or username: http://www.goodreads.com/api#user.show

2. search.books: search for books by isbn, title, or author: http://www.goodreads.com/api#search.b...

Travis: most of our data is from Amazon, and we are also forbidden from building any client side mobile app that caches Amazon data. We are working on solutions to this (both with Amazon and without) and hope to have said solution in the next month or so. We don't give out Amazon book images in our API for that reason - so I don't think you can go afoul by just using our API.

We do have a widget that does that (on widgets tab of my account page). We also have an RSS feed of each users quotes that may suffice (look for rss icon on my quotes page).

Not yet - but we can put it on the todo list. To help us prioritize, what are you hoping to build?

We have one of those, but we took it off the widget page in the last redesign, due to lack of interest, and it being very ugly.

Here is mine: