Collecting and cleaning data

There are two ways in which to get data from Goodreads: through their Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to programmatically access data about books, and through their manual exporting function. Sadly, Goodreads is deprecating their API in the near future and, as of December 2020, are not giving access to more developers.

The original Goodreads app uses the API, but our version will rely on the manual exporting function that the Goodreads website has instead. To get your data, head over to https://www.goodreads.com/review/import and download your own data. If you do not have a Goodreads account, feel free to use my personal data for this, which can be found at https://github.com/tylerjrichards/goodreads_book_demo. I have saved my Goodreads data in a file, called goodreads_history.csv, in a new folder, called streamlit_goodreads_book. To make your own folder with the appropriate setup, run the following in your Terminal...