Goodreads

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Goodreads is a silo for keeping track of books, reviews, and reading progress. Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013. It was announced on 2020-12-17 that Goodreads will "no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools".

How

How to export your data

Goodreads provides export of book lists to CSV, TXT or XLS files [1]. The direct URL for this is at https://www.goodreads.com/review/import. Click the "Export" button to start building the CSV download in the background. The link to the CSV file to download will appear under the export button when it is ready.

The metadata in the CSV are:

Book Id (Goodreads ID used in URLs)
Title
Author
Author l-f (formatted version: last name, first name)
Additional Authors
ISBN
ISBN13
My Rating
Average Rating
Publisher
Binding
Number of Pages
Year Published
Original Publication Year
Date Read
Date Added
Bookshelves
Bookshelves with positions
Exclusive Shelf
My Review
Spoiler
Private Notes
Read Count
Owned Copies

Would be good to mung any of these into h-review based files for import into an indiewebsite -- Kartik Prabhu

There is also a plugin for the desktop software Calibre that will allow one to sync large portions of their data directly to their computer.

How to import your data

To WordPress:

2018-07-28 Glenn Dixon: How to Import Your GoodReads List Into WordPress, for free (archived)

How to POSSE to Goodreads

Main article: POSSE

gRegor Morrill has manually POSSEd reviews to Goodreads.
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/219905031
Kara Mahan has been automatically POSSEing reviews to Goodreads since 2015-12-30
- original: https://kylewm.com/2015/12/review-of-ancillary-justice-by-ann-leckie (could not find archive of this URL)
- POSSE copy: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1484943470
Chris Aldrich has been manually POSSEing both status updates and reviews to GoodReads since 2016-09-13. Examples can be found in this feed.
zacharykaiwrites tracks his books read on Goodreads and plans to leave reviews there.

How to PESOS from Goodreads

Main article: PESOS

Chris Aldrich has experimented with PESOS of data from Goodreads. While each user has a primary RSS feed from Goodreads that can be found on their user page, it's a mixture of various interactions including status updates (with reading progress), follows, bookmarks (aka "want to reads"), reads and other interactions. This doesn't make it easy to map directly to individual post types on one's website.
- Alternate RSS feeds for better posting fidelity:
  - Status updates: https://www.goodreads.com/user_status/list/#######-user-name?format=rss where #######-user-name is the typical user number and name combination at one’s profile page.
  - Bookmarks (for want to read): https://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/#######-user-name?page=1&per_page=100&shelf=to-read&sort=date&utf8=%E2%9C%93
  - Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/#######-user-name?page=1&per_page=100&shelf=read&sort=date&utf8=%E2%9C%93
  - All updates: https://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/#######
- Chris has outlined a method for using services like IFTTT, Zapier, et al. to take RSS feeds and post to websites using webhooks to publish to a website's Micropub endpoint. Those without a Micropub endpoint my consider using direct posting if it's available on IFTTT to their platform.

Features

Multiple shelves (or tags) to categorize your books.
- Books can be put on multiple shelves.
- There are three core, "exclusive" shelves: read, currently-reading, and to-read.
  - All books must be in one and only one of these shelves.
  - Additional "exclusive" shelves can be added by the user.
  - Books can be bookmarked as "want to read" and they'll be placed on that specific shelf
When a book is on the currently-reading shelf, you can post reading progress updates (these are similar to notes, but are specific to books)
- A page number or percentage can be entered
- Optionally, a status of up to 420 characters can be entered
- The currently-reading list shows the percentage complete based on your last reading progress update
A stream of your friends' added books and reading progress updates
- Each can be commented on or liked
An annual reading challenge where you can select the number of books you want to read during that year.
- Your reading progress is tracked and informs you whether you are on track or # books behind.
. . .

Removed Features

September 1, 2022:

Goodreads is removing a few features. You have until 2022-09-01 to request your data which will include:

favorite authors list: See: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Why-are-you-removing-the-favorite-authors-page-from-Goodreads
recommendations in review creation: "we no longer include the options of who recommended a book and who to recommend it to."
owned books: "we no longer support the option to add details about owned books such as condition and purchase date."

API

On 2020-12-15, Goodreads announced that it will "no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools".

Goodreads does have a very complete API that could be used to automate POSSE.

As of 2015-12-29, silo.pub has support for publishing to Goodreads via a micropub API.

The API appears to be good for posting information to Goodreads but not as good for reading information, e.g. for PESOS. For example, there does not appear to be a method to directly retrieve a user's updates (reading progress, reviews). The user.show method gets a user's information along with their 10 latest updates, though. It appears multiple calls to different endpoints are necessary to get more complete information.

In the Goodreads Developers group there is a thread titled "Is the public API maintained at all?" raising some concerns about some things being broken, apparently lack of selfdogfooding by Goodreads (instead using a private, undocumented API). Quite a few other developers echoed the concerns. The thread was started 2017-03-19 and there does not appear to be an official response from Goodreads as of 2019-03-08. [2]

Alternatives

See additional options in the personal library: Tools section

LibraryThing: similar service
BookWyrm: built on ActivityPub
indiebookclub: minimal Micropub client for posting reads to your personal site
...

Brainstorming

POSSE

⚠️ This is older brainstorming from before Goodreads stopped giving out API keys

To POSSE a review to Goodreads would basically involve:

creating an API key and secret with Goodreads
OAuthing on behalf of the user
Searching for the book_id in Goodreads
Searching for the "shelf" in Goodreads
Posting the review

Their API guidelines also *require* a link back to the "original" post in Goodreads.

What if the post on Goodreads is a copy and not the original? - Tantek

How