I am trying to build an app around books. Goodreads has a great catalogue on books. But they stopped providing new API keys since December 2020.
My question is how can I retrieve just book metadata from Goodreads? I don’t want any data associated with a user(in that case, requiring an API key is fair). My only requirement is just meaningless data(in the sense of user privacy) like author name, isbn, book description, cover image, published data, editions, etc.
I tried this get request in Postman, it returns an HTML response with title, author name, etc..:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/0307277674
But, is it a viable solution? is it ok to use get requests like this to fetch the necessary metadata? or am I missing something? or, is there any better way to do this?
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Answer
But, is it a viable solution? is it ok to use get requests like this to fetch the necessary metadata? or am I missing something?
For side project it could be viable, if you plan to build product using such method then it’s no go as some services implement throttling or IP blocking (you can check this by sending enough request in short time).
Retrieving HTML content to access some information is known as web scraping and there are powerful libraries to help with parsing this data (for example Beautiful Soup). This process is often used but if there’s API that exposes this information then API is preferable.
Is Goodreads the only service you can use? Maybe there are more viable public APIs that expose books metadata?