Report: “Goodreads Plans to Retire API Access, Disables Existing API Keys”

From Joe Alcorn/readng:

In news that surprises nobody, Goodreads last week quietly announced the deprecation of their public APIs. And I mean really quietly – the only people who were told about this were those unfortunate enough to have their existing API keys disabled without warning. Other than a small banner at the top of the API docs which mentions vague “plans to retire these tools”, nobody else appears to have heard anything from Goodreads, including those whose API keys remain active. So far it seems any key unused for 30 days has been disabled.

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More From The Open Library Blog: “Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library’s APIs”

As one of the more popular book services online today, tens of thousands of readers and organizations rely on Amazon’s Goodreads APIs to lookup information about books and to power their book-related applications across the web. Some authors rely on the data to showcase their works on their personal homepages, online book stores to promote their inventory, innovative new services like thestorygraph are using this data to help readers discover new insights, and even librarians and scholastic websites rely on book data APIs to make sure their catalog information is as up to date and accurate as possible for their patrons.

For years, the Open Library team has been enthusiastic to share the book space with friends like Goodreads who have historically shown great commitment by enabling patrons to control (download and export) their own data and enabling developers to create flourishing ecosystems which promote books and readership through their APIs.

When it comes to serving an audience of book lovers, there is no “one size fits all” and we’re glad so many different platforms and APIs exist to provide experiences which meet the needs of different communities. And we’d like to do our part to keep the landscape flourishing.

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Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Scholastic