Goodreads Developers discussion

I'm interested in doing some work using the Goodreads API, but I'm somewhat horrified by the Terms of Service developers are required to agree to (http://www.goodreads.com/api/terms). It seems to preclude doing anything useful besides, say, making Goodreads clients for mobile phones.

Personally, I want to use the Goodreads API to e.g. sync lists of the books I've read to a plaintext file on my desktop computer.

With the terms as such, I am disallowed from keeping this data on my machine for more than 24 hours or modifying it locally or giving it to my friends.

Are the terms as posted actually protecting anything, or are they just scaring away potential casual developers (like me)? I realize that the people who make Goodreads are attempting in some way to make money through it, but it would seem to your advantage to encourage people to write code that makes Goodreads more useful for them and others rather than discourage it.

My recommendation to you would be to change the request for developer key to ask for "Name or Company" instead of just a company (just asking for company makes casual developers seem unwelcome), and to relax the ToS, even if only for non-commercial use. It might be that some parts deserve to be a recommendation rather than a requirement, such as the caching clause.

As an example, Twitter's ToS purposefully strive to reach a compromise between protecting Twitter users and allowing productive use of the API. http://twitter.com/apirules

I applaud you for making the ToS short and clear in the first place, however. (And for providing an API!)

Great point, and thank you so much for pointing that out. I am revising the API terms to say:

"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—as you own that data you may store it permanently."

Basically according to our regular websites terms any data you enter into Goodreads is your data - we just have a license to display it - so it's yours to do with as you please.

Thanks for the response, Otis. I look forward to seeing the revised api terms.

What is the process of increase the limit from 1 request (1 isbn) per second to more ?