Hello all,
*(Message to the mods: this is a Meta post, please contact me if something is wrong!)*
# The goodreads-bot Legacy
As you must know if you were already here last year, our beloved bot u/goodreadsbot stopped working in January after having been used **156.631** times on this subreddit by a total of **25.272** different users, because goodreads shut down API access.
As a bored nerd and fellow reader, I decided to start a new toy project: rise our bot back! But because the Goodreads API is now closed, the first task was to build my own Books database… which I did, using Reddit, Goodreads & Google Books.
This new bot called u/goodreads-rebot (“bot” + “reboot” = “rebot”…..) is open source (link to source code below). I wanted to thank u/ArtyomR, the author of u/goodreadsbot, for the original idea. I am not u/ArtyomR, but I have great respect for his/her work and its legacy. Thank you!
# How does it work? Just like before! (with more features)
Write `{{Harry Potter}} in your post` or alternatively `{{A Little Life by Hanya Yaniagara}} (notice the typo)` with a **”by”** and the bot will answer with more information about the **book** or the **series**.
The search part is now part of the bot (and not on Goodreads API side), and was quite challenging to handle. **You definitely should specify the author with the “by” keyword**, because it helps the Database search.
**Examples:**
`You should read {{Harry Potter}} !` will work, it will recognize it as the name of a **Series**, in that case it will provide information about **the first book of the Series;**
`My favorite book is {{Call Me By Your Name}}` will work too, the bot will try to find a book called **Call Me** by author named **Your Name** (because of the “by” keyword…) but it will fail to find one, so as a 2nd try because it’s not *that* dumb, it will indeed find a book called **Call Me By Your Name** 🙂
`Did you read {{1984 by Michael Radford}}?` (notice the wrong author): it will work too even if the author is wrong, because when the search fails using the author, it will try again ignoring it.
# Features
I added a “Top 2 recommended-along” section, featuring the 2 books that were the most recommended here on Reddit in the same threads than the book described. It is based on another toy project of mine (😅), a book recommending algorithm I am working on, which is based on the co-occurences of book titles in Reddit threads. Let me know if you find this new information useful.
# Limitations
As explained before, the bot is based on a book database I build and update as much as I can. The search will sometimes fail to match some existing books, in particular very niche books, or the recent ones. I am working on having the best and up-to-date database as possible, meanwhile sorry for the misses!
Also, the bot is currently not running on other subreddits (like r/booksuggestions), but because the code is really modular, it’s just about configurations. FYI this is in the roadmap for the next few days/weeks.
Finally, I may reach some rate posting limits because of low karma. Hopefully, this will be solved soon after some time thanks to your help 🙂
You will find below more information (links being forbidden in posts).
I think that’s it.
See you there!
by goodreads-rebot