Goodreads Developers discussion

It would be great if the underlying data as well as the API and web interface supported editing anthologies:

eg.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77289

contains 17 stories, and it would be good to know what they were.

Some people add them to descriptions, and that is commendable, but underlying support would be so much better.

This is probably going to be hard, because that kind of information depends on the book metadata we get from our sources, which we don't control. I'll ask around if it's something that any publisher explicitly tracks, and then I'll report back.

At a first look, it seems like this information is probably not tracked by our sources. We'll need to dig deeper to be 100% sure.

We'll think about supporting this in the future, but I must warn you it's not in the immediate plans.

Yeah I can understand the data issue; I think it would have to be user-contributed, which is why API support would be great.

Also trying to get my mind around thorough handling of composite works for the BookCatalogue Android app is proving to be a challenge.

One model needs to cover:

- essays/novellas/novels
- anthologies/omnibi/proceedings
- (academic) papers
- physical books (which may contain any assortment of one or more of the above)

Would be so much easier if you guys did the work for me!

Yeah, I'm afraid we don't track that information explicitly.. and I agree the crowd-sourced approach makes sense.

The only partially related information we do have is:
- series info (e.g.: the Twilight series)
- format (e.g.: paperback, audiobook, leatherbound, etc)
- media type (e.g.: book, periodical, article, not-a-book)
All of the above is in the book#show API response.

Ettore wrote: This is probably going to be hard, because that kind of information depends on the book metadata we get from our sources, which we don't control.

I don't think any of our current data sources supply information about the individual works contained within anthologies, short story collections, books of poetry, et cetera. Moreover, it doesn't look like ONIX, the book industry's standard format for sharing bibliographic information, supports this at all. (I say this with some uncertainty, as I'd have to read the entire ONIX specification to be sure.)

A solution relying on user-supplied data is probably all that's feasible for now. But as Ettore says, it's not on our development roadmap in the near term.