Goodreads Developers discussion

I believe the "Reading Challenge" is a great tool that can create marvelous effect in motivating and engaging people.

I am leading a reading initiative in my small country, Bahrain. Reading is not the most popular of things here, actually it is confined to very limited circles in the society. We, with the power of the Reading Challenge tool, are pushing to make reading a fun and an engaging thing among the mass public. We already had around 200 participants signed up (Bahrain is a very small country in the end of the day with citizens at around 500k). But we need your help.

We have a website and did a small mock-up in 2015 where the progresses of the participants were posted in one page (using the widget available in goodreads.com).

www.bahrainireaders.com/p/blog-page.html (it is in Arabic, but you will understand the concept)

These widgets are nice but will take huge space as we are 200 already (and still counting). Hence, we would like to make a tabular form (sort of dashboard) of the participants and if we can get the code of the number of books read by the user and the number of his target (just the number, no fancy things and graphics). We can update manually everyday but it will be cumbersome job as the number of participants keep increasing. We want a code that will make it an automatic job.

We will do the table and its format etc. We just need a code of the two numbers (books read in 2016, target in 2016) and we will apply the code on all participants.

This will help also other goodreads users who would like to combine several challenges of friends/communities/big organizations/etc. into one table/dashboard where every participant takes one row of space instead of the current available widget which is extremely nice but not the best for masses.

Please put in mind that you are helping a nation to embrace reading!

Any idea how to solve this?

#A nation awaits you.

Hi Yousif,

That's a really awesome project!

Unfortunately we don't have any reading challenge API's right now. I'm putting it in our backlog to add, but not sure when we'll be able to get around to it.

The only thing I can think of right now is maybe you could somehow parse the widget code to get the reading challenge goal and progress to put in your table?

Sorry we can't help you further at this time.

Hey, I'm part of Nothing But Reading Challenges and I write the spreadsheets and backends used for our challenges.

I used this to get all the reviews for books read in a particular year.

private const string UrlGetBookListForShelfYear = "http://www.goodreads.com/review/list?...

id = goodreads ID
shelf = read
page = 1, 2, 3, etc.
read_at=2016
key = Consumer Key

We just have all our members be friends with the moderator account if they have private profiles.

Hope this helps.

Thanks so much, Kelly!

This is really interesting kelly, I will try it out soon