Goodreads

From IndieWeb

Goodreads is a silo for keeping track of books, reviews, and reading progress. Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013. It was announced on 2020-12-17 that Goodreads will "no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools".

How to export your data

Goodreads provides export of book lists to csv, txt or xls files [1]. The direct URL for this is at https://www.goodreads.com/review/import.

  • Would be good to mung any of these into h-review based files for import into an indiewebsite -- Kartik Prabhu

There is also a plugin for the desktop software Calibre that will allow one to sync large portions of their data directly to their computer.

How to import your data

To WordPress:

Features

  • Multiple shelves (or tags) to categorize your books.
    • Books can be put on multiple shelves.
    • There are three core, "exclusive" shelves: read, currently-reading, and to-read.
      • All books must be in one and only one of these shelves.
      • Additional "exclusive" shelves can be added by the user.
      • Books can be bookmarked as "want to read" and they'll be placed on that specific shelf
  • When a book is on the currently-reading shelf, you can post reading progress updates (these are similar to notes, but are specific to books)
    • A page number or percentage can be entered
    • Optionally, a status of up to 420 characters can be entered
    • The currently-reading list shows the percentage complete based on your last reading progress update
  • A stream of your friends' added books and reading progress updates
  • An annual reading challenge where you can select the number of books you want to read during that year.
    • Your reading progress is tracked and informs you whether you are on track or # books behind.
  • . . .

Removed Features

September 1, 2022:

Goodreads is removing a few features. You have until 2022-09-01 to request your data which will include:

POSSE to Goodreads

API for Goodreads

On 2020-12-15, Goodreads announced that it will "no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools".

Goodreads does have a very complete API that could be used to automate POSSE.

As of 2015-12-29, silo.pub has support for publishing to Goodreads via a micropub API.

The API appears to be good for posting information to Goodreads but not as good for reading information, e.g. for PESOS. For example, there does not appear to be a method to directly retrieve a user's updates (reading progress, reviews). The user.show method gets a user's information along with their 10 latest updates, though. It appears multiple calls to different endpoints are necessary to get more complete information.

  • In the Goodreads Developers group there is a thread titled "Is the public API maintained at all?" raising some concerns about some things being broken, apparently lack of selfdogfooding by Goodreads (instead using a private, undocumented API). Quite a few other developers echoed the concerns. The thread was started 2017-03-19 and there does not appear to be an official response from Goodreads as of 2019-03-08. [2]

Brainstorming POSSE

To POSSE a review to Goodreads would basically involve:

  1. creating an API key and secret with Goodreads
  2. OAuthing on behalf of the user
  3. Searching for the book_id in Goodreads
  4. Searching for the "shelf" in Goodreads
  5. Posting the review

Their API guidelines also *require* a link back to the "original" post in Goodreads.

  • What if the post on Goodreads is a copy and not the original? - Tantek


PESOS from Goodreads

See Also