#bookbrainz

Hey bookworms. I got some questions about your API. I'm currently working on a replacement for Readarr (auto downloader / library organizer). Right now I'm using OpenLibrary for the search / metadata but it's... weird. It mixes editions and works and there's essentially no way to get a simple list of books an author has written. So I'm looking for

alternatives, and BookBrainz came up. I see you have an API that looks promising, search / filtering works as I would expect. How far away is the API from being "ready"? The development of this will take a while before I'm happy to release it so I'm not in a rush. But is there a roadmap to when api.bookbrainz.org would be available?

Hello Squeazer (IRC) !

No set roadmap I'm afraid, but it's at the top of my priorities for this first half of the year.

I don't anticipate much change from the current testing version, if that helps.

Hey monkey[m]. Thanks! I'll keep testing it on api.test and then we'll go from there. One question - is there any way for me to fetch a poster / cover image for a specific work? Or do you only do text metadata?

Not at the moment. It's a highly requested feature though, so you're not the only one :)

It's a touchy operation as we can't store any copyrighted material in the project directly. For MusicBrainz we collaborate with the Internet Archive, and the hope is to extend that collaboration for book covers.

That being said, that will take a while and the IA has been very busy recently, so I can't give you a time estimate.

Ok thanks, understandable. Is there any workaround that you could think of, other than searching OL for the title and hoping the same book is found, or something?

You can pull identifiers for OL, ISBN, etc if available, but I can't exactly recommend one way over another.

OL sounds like a good idea, for items that exist there

Ok cool, I'll see if I can make it work, thanks!

One thing - when I query the search API for "works" it doesn't include the author, from what I can see I need to query the /author api for that. IMO including the author name and BBID (or a list of all of them if multiple) in the /search api would be very useful - if I implement a search being able to see the author next to each result is almost a

requirement I'd say. Was this ever considered perhaps?

Squeazer (IRC): I think instead you would hit the API endpoint to retrieve relationships and fin the author using the relationshipTypeId: https://api.test.bookbrainz.org/1/work/1f1796d1...

Hm, search API. Let me look, I think this should be part of the returned data

Yeah search... I don't see it there, example: https://api.test.bookbrainz.org/1/search?q=harr...

Now, from what I can tell, if I want to display the author in my search results I'd need to make 1 search request, then 20 (or however many results are there) requests to /author or the relationships api, before I could show the results. Author should be part of the response from /search, IMO, I'd consider it part of the essential data about a

work.

I think the test search serve and API are outdated, this should now be indexed in the search server and returned with results, like so:

"authors": ["Ray Bradbury"]

So assume that this will also be contained in the API search results

Ah excellent, thanks! Should I use that to test instead of api.test.? Do all other apis work there or is it just search?

For search, probably better to use that, it will give you a cleare idea of what to expect. The rest should be pretty much unchanged.

Got it, thx 👌

Note that the test api is using a test database though, so search results from production may not exist in the test API

I'll focus on updating the test search server soon to avoid that

Oh that would be fantastic, thanks! And good to know, but it's fine if some stuff is missing, the response formats matter more. I won't ask when but I'll be back every now and again till I annoy you enough 👉

Shake on it :D

Hmm will the search api always return the "relationshipSet" and those other sets? That seems like a ton of data that would usually probably be discarded. I mean doesn't matter for my case either way, just thinking out loud.

Also, I think this search api isn't correctly filtering by type=work. If I search for this: https://bookbrainz.org/search/search?q=harry+po... the first result is a turkish translation. That's an edition if I understand correctly right? It also doesn't have the "authors" array 🤔 Although to be fair it did say "Alpha" very

clearly on the home page :D