The recently started basic insights functionality generated a good amount of interest in our users and thus we plan to make to better and more comprehensive.
In the app’s own database, we have only stored the Book which are available for renting and selling via our platform which was the original main purpose. But now for the ‘currently-reading’ or ‘read’ or ‘to-be-read’ sections, a user might wish to add some books which are not available in our database already. To account for that, we decided to go with some external api to fetch the book details.
Procedure
The plan right now is that whenever a user searches for a book, if we have it in our database, we’ll fetch it otherwise we’ll fetch it from an external api. And if a user put it in any of the above mentioned segments, only then we’ll add it to our database, but it will be hidden from sale and rent until we have it in our inventory. This will help us generate more detailed insights for our users and help them choose their next perfect read easily.
Choices
So I had 3 APIs in my mind to choose from. Goodreads, Googlebooks and OpenLibrary. As I took a glance at each of their documentations, I saw Goodreads isn’t currently providing API keys so that was ruled out pretty early. Now between Googlebooks and OpenLibrary, the documentation for GoogleBooks was pretty easy to graph but the only trade-off was its proper lack of genres.
For initial choice, I went with Googlebooks which of course can be changed anytime in future if needed. Hopefully this will enhance the insights’ user experience.
And if you haven’t tried that, have a look into our insights page at https://biblophile.com/readingStreaks/
Thank you.
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