Importing book videos from publishers
Posted by Otis on April 09, 2009
In my my panel at Tools of Change, Tim Spaulding and I called out to book publishers to create API's to open up the meta-data about their books. Most of their data is available through other means already, but it is a pain to get. We didn't quite come to a solution, but one interesting thing has resulted out of this: videos from Youtube!
Random House has an account on YouTube with hundreds of author videos that they have favorited. We worked out with them that if they added link in the description of each video that contained the ISBN of the book mentioned, that we could then use YouTube's API to query those videos and automatically import them on the appropriate author and book pages on Goodreads. And it's working!
For instance, here is their feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/randomhouseinc/favorites?start-index=1&max-results=50.
If you're a publisher and have an account on YouTube, we suggest you do the same for your videos, and then send us the link to your YouTube account! This will ensure your videos will appear on Goodreads for readers to consume. So far we have 2,928 book related videos that have been viewed on Goodreads 68,625 times!
In my my panel at Tools of Change, Tim Spaulding and I called out to book publishers to create API's to open up the meta-data about their books. Most of their data is available through other means already, but it is a pain to get. We didn't quite come to a solution, but one interesting thing has resulted out of this: videos from Youtube!
Random House has an account on YouTube with hundreds of author videos that they have favorited. We worked out with them that if they added link in the description of each video that contained the ISBN of the book mentioned, that we could then use YouTube's API to query those videos and automatically import them on the appropriate author and book pages on Goodreads. And it's working!
For instance, here is their feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/randomhouseinc/favorites?start-index=1&max-results=50.
If you're a publisher and have an account on YouTube, we suggest you do the same for your videos, and then send us the link to your YouTube account! This will ensure your videos will appear on Goodreads for readers to consume. So far we have 2,928 book related videos that have been viewed on Goodreads 68,625 times!
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