As of December 8th 2020, Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools. You can find more information here.

Connect

Goodreads Connect lets people on other websites or applications connect to their Goodreads account, so that app can have access to the member's friends, books, ratings, and reviews. Goodreads Connect can be used in a variety of ways:

eCommerce sites can use Goodreads Connect to allow shoppers to access their to-read shelves and other shelves as part of their shopping experience. Goodreads users’ to-read shelves are the best place to find the books a user explicitly wants to consume. In exchange for providing retailers with a user’s list of books to-read, Goodreads collects an affiliate fee for each purchase initiated from the user’s Goodreads bookshelf. Please contact us for more information.

Access a Persons Favorite Books

By using the API to access the books the member has read, developers can easily power a number of useful experiences, such as a simple widget to let members show off their favorite books on your website.

By analyzing the books a person has read, and combining it with their own data, developers gain access to deeply valuable information about which kind of books to suggest their users might like to read.

Build a Client Application

The Goodreads API can be used to build a fully featured Goodreads Client on a mobile device, desktop, or other application platform. The API supports the following features:

Searching for books and authors
Adding books: reviews, ratings, shelves
Viewing information about a book: friend reviews, meta-data, community reviews, lists, shelves, and more
Adding comments to friends book reviews
Adding friends, and browsing friends of friends
Browsing lists of books in Listopia
Adding progress updates and notes for members reading a book
And much more!

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