I am among the throngs of developers who would really like to use the API to extract genres based on a book list. The best I have been able to do is webscrape from a public user profile (I'm using R, for now). The following line:
html_nodes(".left .bookPageGenreLink")
returns a list of character vectors containing all the genres that are listed for a given book, based on the node for each book. I've done it locally webscraping from my own user profile. This info is in the html for each user's bookshelf, so why is it not available through the API? Those data are present! I want them so bad! I've been banging my head against this issue for weeks.
Webscraping works but is too slow and eventually gets blocked by a 403 error (even if I pause between reads), so obviously that is not a good solution.
html_nodes(".left .bookPageGenreLink")
returns a list of character vectors containing all the genres that are listed for a given book, based on the node for each book. I've done it locally webscraping from my own user profile. This info is in the html for each user's bookshelf, so why is it not available through the API? Those data are present! I want them so bad! I've been banging my head against this issue for weeks.
Webscraping works but is too slow and eventually gets blocked by a 403 error (even if I pause between reads), so obviously that is not a good solution.
Give the people what they want, Goodreads!