/goodreads_scrape

8 tools for Goodreads.com, for finding people based on the books they’ve read, finding books popular among the people you follow, following new book reviews, etc

Primary LanguagePerlGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

📚 Andre's Goodreads Toolbox, v1.20

Maintenance

9 Perl-scripts for Goodreads.com—the world largest book (cataloging) community. What's new?

recentrated.pl

Checks all the books in your shelf for new ratings and notifies you via periodical e-mail. It helps discover new criticisms and users with interesting libraries. You can try this online if you don't want to install anything. It implements the "follow book" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Learn more

friendrated.pl

Prints all books rated 4 or 5 stars by 3 or more persons you follow (including friends). It implements the "books common among the people I follow" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. It also lists the most read authors, the most wished-for and hated books. Learn more

friendnet.pl

Spiders your social network and creates files with edges and nodes which can be easily processed with social network analysis software. It answers questions like: Which members are popular among your friends? Learn more

friendgroup.pl

Prints discussion groups common among the persons you follow (including friends). Searching groups on Goodreads is a PITA, and sometimes you don't know what you can have and wouldn't search for it. Learn more

likeminded.pl

Prints Goodreads members who are interested in the same books as you. It implements the "Finding people based on the books they've read" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Learn more

similarauth.pl

Prints authors who Goodreads thinks are similar to all the authors you're reading. It implements the "Finding [all] similar authors" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Learn more

search.pl

Prints a books search result, ordered by average rating and number of ratings (most popular books), or date published, optionally with exact title matches. The Goodreads website doesn't offer it for some reason. It implements the "Sort search results by rating" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Learn more

savreviews.pl

Saves text-reviews for a book to a text-file. It implements the "Extract all reviews for a specific book" feature that was requested in the Goodreads forums. Learn more

amz-tradein.pl

This script fetched Amazon Trade-In prices for all books in a Goodreads.com shelf ("resales" or "donations"). It automated regular manual bid-checking for hundreds of books, discovering sales opportunities. Amazon stopped its buyback program in 2015. Learn more

www/

Static webpages that I use to offer this software as a service to people who don't know Linux etc. You probably won't need this directory. I'm not getting any money for this software or service, and I hope Goodreads will eventually make those scripts obsolete by offering own solutions to the Goodreads community.

Getting started

GNU/Linux terminal:

$ git clone https://github.com/andre-st/goodreads.git
$ cd goodreads
$ sudo make             # Gets required Perl modules from CPAN (details see Makefile)
$ ./example-script.pl --help
$ ...
$ ...
$ sudo make uninstall   # Finally remove cache, logs etc from sys-dirs (see Makefile)

Microsoft Windows is not officially supported. A user wrote me that he ran the toolbox on the Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Otherwise, resort to a virtual machine program such as VirtualBox and run a Linux image.

The usual runtime of the programs will be long, because Goodreads slows down all requests and we have to load a lot of data. You should start one program and do other things in the meantime. You can break any program and continue later because it reuses already loaded data (file-cache).

Contributing

Further readings