Goodreads Is Retiring Its Current API, and Book-Loving Developers Aren't Happy (medium.com) 69
Last week, some Goodreads users received a disappointing message: The popular book tracking website is disabling access to its API for users who haven't used the product in more than 30 days. The company says it "plans to retire these tools" altogether and that, as of December 8, it will no longer issue new keys. It's unclear when or if Goodreads will close off its API to active users. From a report: "When I found out, I was pretty upset," says Karen Ellett, a software developer in South Carolina who uses the Goodreads API to power a private tool that tracks book series. The tool, which she had hoped to eventually release for other people to use, keeps track of new releases in book series she reads, which is a function Goodreads doesn't currently offer. When a new book gets added to the series, Ellett's tool updates automatically, so she doesn't have to go looking for it on her own when she's ready to dive back into the series. Since she's read 172 books this year, it's not easy for her to mentally juggle all the new additions she wants to get to on her own.
"I've put so many hours into developing this tool not just for myself, but with an eye towards it being utilized by other people. I'd say I was probably about 70 to 80% done, and now there's just no point," she says. As Goodreads is a stagnant product that has barely improved its functionality and features since it was acquired by Amazon in 2013, thousands of readers with basic coding skills use the Goodreads API to power their own better features and tools. On a thread about the change for Goodreads Developers, one user says the Discord book recommendations bot he was in the process of building suddenly stopped working. Another says his tool, which analyzes statistics related to the authors on a Goodreads user's "read" list, will be shut down, nullifying countless hours of work he put into the feature. Ellett still uses the API daily, so her access to the API hasn't been shut down -- yet. She heard about it from a friend who forwarded the email to her. Many Goodreads API users complain that the communication from Goodreads has been terrible, with people only hearing about the change from intermittent users whose access was suddenly terminated.
"I've put so many hours into developing this tool not just for myself, but with an eye towards it being utilized by other people. I'd say I was probably about 70 to 80% done, and now there's just no point," she says. As Goodreads is a stagnant product that has barely improved its functionality and features since it was acquired by Amazon in 2013, thousands of readers with basic coding skills use the Goodreads API to power their own better features and tools. On a thread about the change for Goodreads Developers, one user says the Discord book recommendations bot he was in the process of building suddenly stopped working. Another says his tool, which analyzes statistics related to the authors on a Goodreads user's "read" list, will be shut down, nullifying countless hours of work he put into the feature. Ellett still uses the API daily, so her access to the API hasn't been shut down -- yet. She heard about it from a friend who forwarded the email to her. Many Goodreads API users complain that the communication from Goodreads has been terrible, with people only hearing about the change from intermittent users whose access was suddenly terminated.
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Will that make you better compost after you die?
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And no-one should have to visit bhcompy's house.
Re:Should have read coding books instead of fictio (Score:4, Interesting)
I would hope and assume the answer is YES.
Geez, especially here in 2020, people need some escapism....
Do you never watch movies and only view true to life documentaries?
Frankly, I used to be a political news junkie.
I loved watching all of the various news outlets and all...but over the past 6-7 years, well, its just too much to watch really.
I got tired of yelling "Fuck you" at the talking heads and well, I just turned it off and feel MUCH better with it. My BP is more normal now.
I watch mostly the local news for weather and watch JUST enough to know what's going on on the world, but for the most part...the "real" stuff to know is just a PITA, stressful and I'd rather enjoy my life and reading a good escapist book, just like a fantasy movie, is relaxing and fun.
But the motto of Slashdot 2020 is TL;DR (Score:2)
I predict you won't get much traction with those radical ideas. I sympathize, and I even read lots of books, but I strongly believe that is distinctly abnormal as the current users see things.
Maybe they should run a poll? Actually, Slashdot has run end-of-year AskSlashdot stories asking for favorite books, though I can't recall if they bothered last year. Pretty sure they've run polls, too.
I'm usually reading a number of books. Right now the most computerish book is a history of speech recognition. It just
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A disinterest in fiction is a symptom of Asperger's.
I have never read a work of fiction that wasn't a school assignment.
I occasionally watch movies but prefer documentaries.
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It's hard to say which way the arrow of causality goes.
It's well established that fiction readers have more empathy.
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Sorry, the intelligent people's factual books trump your fictional "well established" beliefs.
That's by design you know (Score:2)
Not that I blame you, but it still sucks that the strategy seems to work.
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Oh, I still vote.
I keep up enough to know what's going on on the world.
It didn't work out for me this time, but, hopefully, the norm remains that there is gridlock and neither party can do too much damage till the other side becomes majority again.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Re:Should have read coding books instead of fictio (Score:5, Insightful)
Do normal people over 20 and under 70 actually read fiction any more ?
Yes. All the time. We just call it "mainstream news" these days.
So much REAL stuff to know about, and they're wasting their lives reading soppy romance and silly fantasy ?
Either my sarcasm meter is grossly uncalibrated, or you're from another planet. There's nothing REAL about our Insta-world filled with lying narcissists.
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Mod parent up and grandparent down?
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Yes, that's how debate goes nowadays - don't argue, just suppress any opposing viewpoints you cannot refute
Those who eschew the facts of history for the opium of fiction are doomed to repeat it.
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Those who eschew the facts of history for the opium of fiction are doomed to repeat it.
How dramatic, so I'm curious, describe to me an alternate timeline without fiction, or explain to me how people would develop immensely without the "opium of fiction". God, why do people have to be so dramatic here.
Ontologies of trolls? But who cares? (Score:2)
I think you're feeding a troll. Maybe an old one, or maybe just senile. Kind of pre-literate or anti-literate?
But it does remind me of a (typically) bad joke:
Q: What are the two kinds of trolls you find on Slashdot 2020?
A: (1) Small-minded with small balls. (2) Small-minded with even smaller balls.
Just joking. (Am I ever serious?) But in dimensional terms (for the MEPR solution approach), I would weight the first dimension fairly heavily. Narrow minds are rarely educational and only sometimes funny (and by
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What are the two kinds of trolls you find on Slashdot 2020?
Why, you! [slashdot.org] of course! Big balls, little balls, no balls, you're all of them!
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-1
See? Your bot is trolling again (Score:1)
Give it rest, fella!
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-2
Troll bots are infesting Slashdot! (Score:1)
Where's Microsoft's bot take-down machine when you need it?
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-3
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"God, why do people have to be so dramatic here."
"Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction [blogspot.co.il]"
You can't make some people up.
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My youngest who is 12 read 200-300 pages a day of fiction and fantasy. /. :(
My wife reads an hour of mostly fiction every night.
Me... I’m stuck on
Re:Should have read coding books instead of fictio (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. In between books about theoretical physics, astronomy, history, extinction level events in Earth's past and biographies I'll toss in a book or three that's pure sci-fi or fantasy just to escape all the head-pounding reality that's all around us. Granted, I grew up in an age when reading was considered a good thing, so I was reading two to three books a week in my teen years. I'm a little busier now, at age 47, so I only manage a book or two a month on average, but it's still nice to step out of reality for a moment or two here or there.
It's not like me reading a book about dragons somehow wipes out the knowledge I've acquired over the years from the piles of non-fiction I read.
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Many fiction books are as full of interesting ideas to explores. I enjoy a mix of both fiction and non-fiction.
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Then yes to that, but really only news sites and various wikis.
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I agree. Fiction in general is stupid, but people do read fiction. What's worse though is lying with non-fiction, susceptible minds fall to that .. I mean, stuff like cherry picked facts .. sometimes spiced with a little lies .. in order to pain a narrative.
Doesn't matter (Score:1)
"disabling access to its API for users who haven't used the product in more than 30 days. "
So we'll have to run our scripts twice a month to automatically download torrents of good books.
No biggie.
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If you can write code to extract book info from Goodreads and find a torrent from just that, I am impressed.
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It's actually quite easy, the warez groups that release pirate ebooks kindly include the ISBN and make sure the title is accurate. You can do the same with TV shows as they use standard titles and season/episode numbers.
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So you have code that can automatically search for torrents containing a given ISBN ?
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Many torrent sites support it.
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disabling access to its API for users who haven't used the product in more than 30 days.
So, how much does a valid API key go for on the black market?
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disabling access to its API for users who haven't used the product in more than 30 days.
So, how much does a valid API key go for on the black market?
You mean the black market that likely also "trades" in illegal digital books? That's funny right there. This is like asking the mafia for a liquor license during Prohibition.
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So, how much does a valid API key go for on the black market?
Not much. TFS quoted only ONE (1) person complaining about this API disappearing. That one person has a partially finished app that she hasn't worked on in over a month.
I don't think you are going to have a bidding war for your API key.
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It as supposed to be a female programmer complaining. Clearly fictional.
Amazon API (Score:2)
So use Amazon's APIs
Re:Amazon API #AD (Score:1)
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Or build your own. This would be an ideal open source project.
MusicBrainz is a good example. An open source database of music and metadata to recognize music. It can auto-tag your music library.
Books should be even easier, they all have a nice unique identifier (ISBN).
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Nice unique identifier... add "unambiguous", and you'll start thinking the system is perfect. Except the ISBN doesn't strictly deserve any one of these adjectives.
1) Not all books have an ISBN (the best you could say is that most modern books indeed have one)
2) Some books have more than one ISBN
3) Some ISBNs have been re-used for a different book after the first one went out of print
The down side to cloud-everything (Score:1, Insightful)
Google is the worst offender but this story is a good reminder that whatever company or API someone relies on for their app or business to function has no guarantee of being there tomorrow. Countless people have created code with underlying service dependencies completely outside their control.
Or in the case of SolarWinds and others before them, invited security holes into their environments.
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OMB has a history of posting utter nonsense. I think he's posting at -1 by default at this point. I don't see any history on that comment of mods downvoting it.
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Google is the worst offender but this story is a good reminder that whatever company or API someone relies on for their app or business to function has no guarantee of being there tomorrow. Countless people have created code with underlying service dependencies completely outside their control.
Or in the case of SolarWinds and others before them, invited security holes into their environments.
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Countless people have created code with underlying service dependencies completely outside their control.
Your post was VERY unfairly modded down, as you are absolutely correct. Every bit of control you surrender (that you are otherwise capable of exercising) leaves you that much more vulnerable to disaster.
Usually they wait until Google buys them... (Score:1)
... to cash out and shut down.
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Not sure Amazon wants to sell.
Independent but with a sustainable business model? (Score:2)
Minimal background: I read a lot and like to keep track of the books I've read. Mostly that was to avoid dupes and my solution was a personal database, but I added various other uses over the years. I investigated GoodReads (and other websites over the years), but decided against using it, mostly because of the taint of Amazon. Turns out I was right, but one of those cases where I would have been happier wrong.
History of my solution: My BookList database mutated through various forms over the years. It was
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One misleading part there. My initial decision against GoodReads was actually because of the ISBN problem. Pretty sure that was before Amazon bought it (but possibly only before I knew that Amazon had purchased it).
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What are you asking for ?
An open source database system for real books ?
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Yes, but...
Obviously I mustn't TL;DR you.
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That's how it goes if you rely on 3rd party (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how it goes if you rely on 3rd party APIs and especially with free ones you have to always assume they might stop working at any time. E.g. I built an iOS client [apple.com] for the weather service 7Timer, because it gave some great tools for amateur astronomers, so I wanted to use it myself in a better form. As the app started becoming more popular, the frequent outages of the service due to being on a Chinese university server, started affecting people, so I offered my own hosting which now has the primary mirror for the server, so that I can control it. Even so, the service itself relies on external APIs (provided by NOAA), which may change or the specific model can be discontinued etc, so I added a second source to the app as a backup. It so happens that my second source (Dark Sky) got acquired by Apple and will cease in about a year, so I have another 2 sources on standby to take over in the app at any moment. And all that for a free app :)
I can understand people's frustration. So many services where I have invested a lot of time have shut down - even one book related, I forgot how it was called but it was before bookreads and I was adding the books I was reading (mostly Sci Fi) and reviews there, until one day "poof" they were gone. But that's how it is, you can't expect to rely on a free service forever.
PS. Not directly related, but occurred to me while writing this that my favorite free service that has been discontinued (apart from some IRC communities, which were abandoned/changed before they stopped working) has to be Audiogalaxy Satellite.
Advantage of open data (Score:3)
One more argument for make user contributed data available and under an open license, if you can get it working (as a non-profit or business). Goodreads may be a nice site, but you get reliant on the whims of a third party - even if the data is created by users.
If the non-profits running Open Streetmap or Wikipedia would behave ill enough[*], both the database and software is available, licenses for reuse and most probably mirrored by other people. This way the project could be forked - as have been the case for software - for example XFree86 / Xorg and Cyanogenmod / Lineage OS.
Possibly even the threat of forking helps to curb things like closing access to all APIs.
Another Google product deprecated (Score:2)
Whatâ(TM)s happening here with Goodreads is why I donâ(TM)t depend on Google except for gmail.
They obsolete services used in commercial and open products all the time. This is one of the failings of using 3rd party services - especially, those offered by Google.
Just hoping they donâ(TM)t deprecate gmail anytime soon.
Re:Another Google product deprecated (Score:4, Funny)
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Whatâ(TM)s happening here with Goodreads is why I donâ(TM)t depend on Amazon except for... Erm nothing
Too commercial, dumped for LibraryThing (Score:3, Informative)
The site pretended to be a cloud personal library catalog and book recommendation service, but you couldn't distinguish between books you owned, read from the library, or simply wanted to read, without creating your own categories. It was completely oriented towards selling books, and individuals existed to provide free reviews. I gave up on it several years ago and transferred my library to LibraryThing, which actually does everything Goodreads claimed to do. There are a number of free online services that do as much these days. Good riddance of a manipulative corporate pretender.
Librarything alternative (Score:3)
Any actual users of these API here? (Score:1)
Hit me, if you need some data from our DB.