Book scraper yak shave
Exporting book data from Goodreads turned into a programming side quest.
Hi friends,
I wrote about how trying to get all of my book reviews and notes out of Goodreads turned into a weird programming side quest. "Yak shaving" is what programmers jokingly call these alluring and seemingly necessary activities you do on the way to doing the thing you actually want to do. Even if you're not a programmer, you've probably found yourself doing something like that.
Book scraper yak shave: I just wanted to export my book data from Goodreads
Goodreads has an export function, but, as I quickly discovered, it doesn't export all the data you might want, and some of it is formatted in annoying ways. No problem, I though, I'll open it in a spreadsheet (the export is a CSV) and clean it up. I'm trying to learn Python and cleaning up a bunch of data sounds exactly like an Automate the Boring Stuff with Python kind of problem. But I have so many books and the data was so messy. I might need to grab it myself to create a cleaner output.
Thanks for reading and see you on the internet!
AK