Books and authors

The core lookups: a book, the author behind it, the series it belongs to, the books like it, and the reviews on its page. Each takes an id or a full Goodreads URL.

A book

goodread book 2767052

book takes one id or several at once, and accepts URLs as well as bare ids:

goodread book 2767052 --format json
goodread book 2767052 5907 --format csv
goodread book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052

A book record carries the fields you would expect from the page: book_id, title, title_without_series, description, author_id, author_name, isbn, isbn13, asin, avg_rating, ratings_count, reviews_count, published_year, publisher, language, pages, format, series_id, series_name, series_position, genres, cover_url, url, and similar_book_ids.

Add --with-reviews to also pull the reviews embedded on the page:

goodread book 2767052 --with-reviews

An author

goodread author 153394

Like book, it takes several ids and accepts URLs:

goodread author 153394 1077326 --format csv

An author record carries author_id, name, bio, photo_url, website, born_date, died_date, hometown, influences, genres, avg_rating, ratings_count, books_count, followers_count, notable_book_ids, and url.

A series

goodread series 73758            # the series header
goodread series 73758 --books    # the books in the series

The header carries series_id, name, description, total_books, primary_work_count, and book_ids. With --books you get one row per book in reading order.

Similar books

goodread similar 2767052

similar returns the books Goodreads lists as similar to the one you name.

Reviews

goodread reviews 2767052

reviews returns the reviews embedded on a book's page.

The WAF caveat

book, similar, and reviews all read the /book/show/ HTML page, which is the page the AWS WAF sometimes challenges. When a request is challenged, goodread exits with code 5 ("blocked") rather than returning partial junk, and the hint suggests --cookies.

The fix is to lend the request a real session. Export a Netscape cookies.txt jar from a signed-in browser and pass it:

goodread book 2767052 --cookies ~/cookies.txt

Slowing down helps too (the default --delay is already two seconds). For the fields that the open endpoints carry, prefer search --books and shelf, which are not challenged. See troubleshooting for the cookie file format and more.