2022-05-24
Even though my Spine Generator project is done to death, I was inspired to redo the data/backend ONE MORE TIME when I realized I actually was able to grab my book data from Open Library via API. While I was working on it, I also decided to give it a little facelift by grabbing cover colors from the get-image-colors library rather than Vibrant.js which was just not designed to do what I wanted it to.
And since I got that looking significantly prettier, I also added some futzing around with random fonts and properly centering the text on the books (as opposed to the strange hack I had before š ) so that titles donāt run off the edge of the booksā¦ usually.
Check it out here!
Writing about how excited I am about Open Library got me poking around the Open Library APIs a bit more until I realized itās totally possible for me to grab my lists of currently reading, read, and want to read books, as long as I keep those lists public on my profile.
Itās not documented super well, but reading the āfine printāā¦
More APIs
Did you know, nearly every page on Open Library is or has an API. You can return structured bibliographic data for any page by adding a .rdf/.json/.yml extension to the end of any Open Library identifier. For instance: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15626917W.json or https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL33421A.json. Many pages, such as the Books, Authors, and Lists, will include links to their RDF and JSON formats.
I started to wonder if the lists under my
profile page might be included in the ānearly every pageā that has
an APIā¦ It was easy enough to check, I was able to do a quick
curl to the url and bam:
curl -s -H 'Accept: application/json' 'https://openlibrary.org/people/stinkerelly/books/currently-reading.json'{"page": 1, "reading_log_entries": [{"work": {"title": "The Happiness Project", "key": "/works/OL15833228W", "author_keys": ["/authors/OL2747599A"], "author_names": ["Gretchen Rubin"], "first_publish_year": 2011, "lending_edition_s": "OL24743543M", "edition_key": ["OL32162737M", "OL24743543M", "OL32162738M", "OL28570814M", "OL28696298M"], "cover_id": null, "cover_edition_key": "OL32162737M"}, "logged_edition": "/books/OL24743543M", "logged_date": "2021/08/24, 15:26:01"}, ... ETC, ETCWeāve got data!
After this was working, I really thought that it was going to be super easy to integrate this with my existing visualization. And, it was! Except I got a little to excited that this was finally š workingāØ the way I had wanted from the very beginning and decided to start changing everything. Classic.
If you check out the ObservableHQ notebook you can read more about what I did.
LOVE IT! THANKS FOR READING? Feedback? Send it to me on Twitter @shanamatthews!
Complaints? Criticism? Go ahead and direct as follows:
>/dev/null 2>&1