Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library’s APIs

by Mek

Today Joe Alcorn, founder of readng, published an article (https://joealcorn.co.uk/blog/2020/goodreads-retiring-API) sharing news with readers that Amazon’s Goodreads service is in the process of retiring their developer APIs, with an effective start date of last Tuesday, December 8th, 2020.

Deprecation notice on Goodreads API documentation
A screenshot taken from Joe Alcorn’s post

The topic stirred discussion among developers and book lovers alike, making the front-page of the popular Hacker News website.

Hacker News at 2020-12-13 1:30pm Pacific.
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Amplifying the Voices Behind Books With the Power of Data

Exploring how Open Library uses author data to help readers move from imagination to impact

By Nick Norman, Edited by Mek & Drini

Image Source: Pexels / Pixabay from popsugar

According to René Descartes, a creative mathematician, “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest [people] of past centuries.” If that’s true, then who are some of the people you’re talking to?

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Giacomo Cignoni: My Internship at the Internet Archive

This summer, Open Library and the Internet Archive took part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a Google initiative to help students gain coding experience by contributing to open source projects. I was lucky enough to mentor Giacomo while he worked on improving our BookReader experience and infrastructure. We have invited Giacomo to write a blog post to share some of the wonderful work he has done and his learnings. It was a pleasure working with you Giacomo, and we all wish you the best of luck with the rest of your studies! – Drini


Hi, I am Giacomo Cignoni, a 2nd year computer science student from Italy. I submitted my 2020 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project to work with the Internet Archive and I was selected for it. In this blogpost, I want to tell you about my experience and my accomplishments working this summer on BookReader, Internet Archive’s open source book reading web application.

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Google Summer of Code 2020: Adoption by Book Lovers

by Tabish Shaikh & Mek

OpenLibrary.org,the world’s best-kept library secret: Let’s make it easier for book lovers to discover and get started with Open Library.

Hi, my name is Tabish Shaikh and this summer I participated in the Google Summer of Code program with Open Library to develop improvements which will help book lovers discover and use OpenLibrary.org.

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