Jeff’s Comments (group member since May 08, 2013)

Jeff’s comments from the Goodreads Developers group.

Hi Ahmed,

That's a pretty good list. Here are a few more that can be returned:
* userquote (friend liked a quote)
* userlistvote
* userstatus (the most recent progress update they submitted on any book)
* readstatus (changing the exclusive shelf of a book, for example moving a book from to-read to read)
* friend (user is now friends with)

Hi John,

Thanks for the bug report. I filed a ticket for this bug, but I can't promise when we'll be able to fix it.

(for future reference, ticket is IOS-3089)

Hi Yavor, is the book on "to-read" after the first request?

Hi Akinwale,

Sorry, but there is no way to do this our public API as we've never had a need in any of our client apps for that type of summarization.

Hi Étienne,

I think you've correctly described the only way to do this with the current API. We've never had a need on our end to promote author details in listings for other objects. Sorry!

Jeff

You can make a subsequent call to book.show to get the list of authors for a specific book if you just want the role information.
However, it's likely you can't do this quickly for all of the search results without hitting the rate limit.

Hi Jeff,

Sorry about the troubles you're having. The documentation is misleading.

In the search function the website, search genre doesn't search for books by genre, it searches for genres with that name, which users can then click on to see some books that have that "tag"

This option won't work in the API search method because that method only returns books. We don't provide book lists of genres at this time through the API.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Jeff

Slim,

Sorry for the late reply, but were you able to get the Jon's python Oauth example working? Were you able to get the session or did it fail on the add to shelf call?

I just tried it and it appears to be up-to-date. I was able to add two books to my to-read shelf for my test user.

Hi Thomas,

What Ruby tutorial are you referring to?

That doesn't look like a valid URL. Perhaps it was when the tutorial was written.

The way to search for books by title is this:

https://www.goodreads.com/api/index#s...

The basic book/show/ API call returns XML containing the title and author info. There is also a tag called "series_works" which contains the series info that you are looking for. Series are made up of works which have a "best book" which is representative of that work.

A Work refers to the abstract version of a book that isn't tied to any particular edition or translation. Works are associated with one or more Book IDs. Works also have a "best book" which librarians consider to be a good representative edition.

For example, the best book for War and Peace has book ID 656, which refers to a 1998 edition from Oxford University, translated by specific people. The "work" War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy has work ID 4912783 and there are 137 different editions of this book in Goodreads.

We limit API access to review data. We do provide access to reviews on a case-by-case basis.

If you look at the sample XML response in the API docs, the "reviews" tag will have a "start", "end", and "total" attributes. These attributes will describe the page bounds.

You can use the "page" parameter with a number to get subsequent pages.

There is no way to do this with our current API unfortunately.

Hi, if you are signed into Goodreads with your account and your account has your developer key associated with it, you will see URLs for sample API calls which you can click to see an example response.

Hi, we don't have an API call for listing all of the books in Goodreads. Sorry.

Hi, thanks for your bug report. I looked at the results from that call and is pretty clear that there is something wrong. I've filed a ticket (internal ticket #IOS-2762) and it should hopefully be fixed at some point.

Have you put the arguments in the OAuth body?

Hi Yong,

Have you tried the "book/show" API endpoint? The XML which comes back is has a list of reviews paginated into pages of 30 reviews each and should have the entirety of the review texts.

The documentation says "Get an XML or JSON file that contains embed code for the iframe reviews widget" but later it says "XML responses also include shelves and book meta-data". I think this is probably confusing because it sounds like all this call is good for is getting an iframe embed code. In reality, our apps use this API endpoint for getting information for when we show a book. There is an argument called "page" which you can pass to get different pages of reviews in the book meta data that comes back.

It is quite inefficient bandwidth-wise but that what we have at the moment.

I would try the JSON version of the call but it may not be as complete as the XML version.

Hope this helps.

Ankit,

I believe you need to put all of the arguments in the OAuth body in order for the call to work.

POST to https://www.goodreads.com/group/join

and put the id and format parameter with the other OAuth args (like your key).

Hi, I do not believe we can create an API call that maps user IDs to email addresses. That would expose all user email addresses to anyone with a developer key and would create the risk of gross privacy violations.

If you need to map a user ID in your app to a Goodreads user ID, you simply associate their user ID with their user ID on your side right after performing OAuth on behalf of the user. Presumably, you already have their email address, right?

If this is not the case, could you explain more what you are trying to achieve?