Goodreads Developers discussion

An application(not yet launched) that my friends and myself are developing uses goodreads API. We would like to understand one functionality. This is what we're planning to do: Use API function to retrieve image of the book from goodreads, and store that image in our local server. Is this allowed ?

This was the response from support when I wrote to them: Thanks for your message! To clarify, we actually aren't able to share any images (book covers or author pictures) via our API. These images are typically provided by the authors themselves or other third parties, like Ingram, and are thus excluded from our API because we don't have a license to distribute the data. I'm sorry about that.

Our response: We are using the search.books API (https://www.goodreads.com/api/index#s...) to query books by name in the goodreads database. The xml response we get contains the results of the query we made. Each result contains, the title of the book, the author's name and an image_url among other things. This image_url is nothing but a link to a small image of the cover of the book. We would like to save this particular image of the cover of the book, which we receive from the search.books API and we would like to know if there are any legal issues in doing so. As far as we know, using the images of the cover of the books, is a widely followed practice among bloggers who write reviews of the books.

Primarily, we would like to understand whether we are allowed to do this ? Thanks.

Any input from moderators/developers who uses the APIs ?
Thanks for your time.

Do you mean the image or the URL?

We don't have the the ability to redistribute the images. Regarding the URL, see #5 of the API terms:

You may store information obtained from the Goodreads API for up to 24 hours. Goodreads needs the ability to modify, remove, and update the order of our data, which caching would prevent. An exception to this rule is if the data is from your own account or the OAuth-authenticated users account, in which case the data may be stored permanently.