Storing Goodreads data

[Ajay Rahul]

Hi , i am a college student . Me and my team are developing a non-profit mobile application that serves as platform for sharing books among students in our college campus. Our app allows users to add and showcase their book collection , and view other person's collection as well, and accordingly share the book(s) needed, thus enhancing the book-reading culture in colleges.
Our app uses GoodReads API. The app requires to store the goodreads data in our server for a period of time .
We were wondering if GoodReads can give us the permission to do so , and if not, what may be the alternatives (is there a paid plan or something ? ).

[Kara]

Hi Ajayrahul,

I am not a Goodreads staff member so I can’t give you a definitive response, but I was wondering if you’ve seen this part of the terms of service?

You may store information obtained from the Goodreads API for up to 24 hours. Goodreads needs the ability to modify, remove, and update the order of our data, which caching would prevent. An exception to this rule is if the data is from your own account or the OAuth-authenticated users account, in which case the data may be stored permanently.

(Emphasis mine.)

So as long as your users are authenticating you can store the data. I believe this clause is in there to prevent people from using the API to scrape all of Goodreads' publicly available data and then go off and build some other database from it.

[Marco]

Hi Ajayrahul,

The extract pasted above from the TOS is accurate - thanks Ben for your response. We don't allow querying our API to download content and persist it elsewhere, with scraping being on top of the list of reasons why it's not allowed. The other being that our data is constantly changing and updating thanks to the input of our community and our librarians.

One option you could consider, instead of downloading data, is to fetch data from our API real time. you would need your accounts to reference a matching Goodreads account. Hope this can set you off the right direction.

Thanks again for your interest in using our API.
Marco

[Billy]

Ajay Rahul wrote: "Hi , i am a college student . Me and my team are developing a non-profit mobile application that serves as platform for sharing books among students in our college campus. Our app allows users to a..."

How's the book sharing apks going?