Ask HN: APIs for getting books and author data

1 points by andher 5 years ago | 1 comment

Hey ya'll, I wanted to build a personal project for better tracking the books I read. I was wondering if:

1. There are any good apis for getting book data and author information (including demographic information). Paid is fine as well, if it's not too much I could consider that.

2. Anyones built something similar which collates this data from different places. Would be interested in hearing the how of that.

Cheers

dredmorbius 5 years ago |

I'd suggest looking at OCLC (Worldcat) or the Library of Congress.

https://www.loc.gov/apis/json-and-yaml/

https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/worldcat...

Cataloging information is pretty straightforward to find. Author demographics may be trickier, though if you can sort how to query Wikipedia, you might be able to work with something there.

Wikipedia's BookSource page(s) might also be of value. It's indexed by ISBN, so you'll need to provide that or acquire it elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0571345751

There's ISBN Search: https://isbnsearch.org/