A very simple scraper for goodreads edition details.

I wrote this scraper to help my sister with her bachelors thesis. It requires her to analyze a lot of data obtained from the goodreads website. Of course obtaining the data by hand is possible but very tedious (we are talking about reading a couple hundred webpages). Hence this little scraper was created.

This program is only available from the GitHub releases.

You need to have Java installed and available on the command line.

Goodreads has a page for every book where all the editions of that book are listed, together with some metadata (see this example). This scraper now expects a list of such addresses as input. It will look at every single one of the provided websites and read out the following information

For ways to run and configure the program take a look at the usage section.

To run the program simply put the jar in a folder of your choice. Then open a command prompt (start -> execute -> cmd under windows) and navigate to the folder where you just put the jar.

You can now run the program with java -jar goodreadsscraper.jar.

To function the program needs two additional files:

This file contains all the websites to look at. Simply put one URL per line into this file.

https://goodreads.com/book1
https://goodreads.com/book2
...

This file contains the filter strings for the types you are looking for. The number of different types is endless and depending on your use case you might not be interested in some and they will also vary between books. With this file you can define keywords (again one per line). The program will search for these keywords on the website. If a keyword is found the line will be split by , and then the part that contains the keyword will be used for the output.

# assuming you have Paperback in your types.txt
Paperback, 343 pages -> Paperback
Unedited Paperback, 200 pages -> Unedited Paperback
Original, Paperback, 1 page -> Paperback

The output will be written to output.csv into the same folder. This csv file contains the following columns (currently without header).

This program has been hacked together in a couple hours to help my sister. There is no real care gone into regarding code quality, extendability or maintainability. I will add some tests for my own good nights rest but not more. So.. you have been warned.

(Source: xkcd)