Alexis’s
Comments
(group member since Aug 26, 2016)
Alexis’s
comments
from the Goodreads Developers group.
Showing 1-12 of 12
This is my favorite thread on the whole site. :D
Hi Jess, you rock. I'm gonna check it out!
yeah, there is no API that has that. That is some sort of Goodreads internal thing to generate canonical genres. It's pretty unfortunate.
I posted this in a similar thread like a month ago, but basically you need to use this endpoint to get the top shelves people have chosen for the book.
I haven't seen that as part of the API, pretty sure you just have to get the list of shelves that people tag a book as and then use those to filter. You could get the 5 most frequent shelves on a book. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/0...) Anyway that's what I did when I needed to use genres for something; unfortunately there aren't canonical genres.
Cool idea!
Pat wrote: "I Feeling you. I started building a wrapper for the API but it is all a mess. There is so much potential..."Yup! I started that for Scala and gave up after a bit (well, I still kind of want to :)) because it is so slow and inconsistent. It's fun to use for small projects, but I couldn't imagine trying to make something very large, which I guess is the point from their perspective.
Nishad wrote: Ha, I just read this! Fortunately, I'm qualified for one of the open positions. Just applied, fingers crossed.
Good luck :) I was thinking about applying, but I don't think I'm *quite* qualified yet. A few more years in the biz and maybe. :P
Nishad wrote: "Goodreads, hire me and I'll implement JSON responses in the REST API myself"Haha! I can just see the interview. "Nishad, why do you want to work here?" "I just need some json endpoints!"
I haven't seen any api's that let you specify more than one shelf, or exclude some shelves. The only thing I could think to do is first get all of the "to-read" books, then filter out the ones that say "owned." It would be really useful to be able to exclude shelves; I've thought about this just on the website too, but especially in a program!
In the api that returns a user's info "user.show", the XML output includes a field called "favorite_authors".
An extremely non-technical way to get your own user_id is to grab it from your goodreads' page's url: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...It is 15768482.
There's also an old discussion here about it here.