Goodreads Scraper - Books, Ratings, ISBNs & Genres

Extract book data from Goodreads, the largest reader community and de facto public catalogue of what people actually read. Search a term, a curated list or a shelf, and export a clean bibliographic table with ratings attached.

What you get per book

Field	Example
title	Dune
author	Frank Herbert
seriesName	Dune Chronicles
isbn, isbn13	catalogue identifiers
publisher, publicationYear	Ace, 1965
pageCount	412
genres	["Science Fiction", "Classics"]
averageRating	4.27
ratingsCount, reviewsCount	1.4M ratings, 62k reviews
description	blurb when descriptions are enabled
coverImageUrl	cover image
bookId, goodreadsUrl	identifier and link

Search filters

• searchQuery - title, author or keyword, e.g. dune, Ursula Le Guin
• listId - a Goodreads list to export
• shelf - a shelf such as to-read or a genre shelf
• includeDescription - fetch the blurb per book
• maxResults - how many books to save

Example input

{
  "searchQuery": "dune",
  "includeDescription": true,
  "maxResults": 50
}

Use cases

• Publishing and acquisition research - see how comparable titles are rated and how many readers they reached
• Catalogue and metadata building - resolve titles to ISBN, publisher, page count and genre
• Bookselling and recommendation engines - build a genre-tagged dataset with popularity signals
• Literary trend analysis - track which genres and series accumulate ratings over time
• Library and collection management - enrich a holdings list with ratings and genres
• Author and series research - map a series' entries with their individual reception

Why Goodreads ratings matter

ratingsCount is a demand signal, not an opinion: it counts how many people cared enough to rate the book at all. Combined with averageRating it separates the genuinely popular from the narrowly beloved, which is exactly the distinction a publisher or bookseller needs and which sales rank alone does not give.

The presence of both isbn and isbn13 makes the export joinable against any commercial book database.

Notes

• isbn fields are empty for some editions, particularly older and self-published titles.
• averageRating and the counts are snapshots and keep rising for active titles.
• Genres are reader-assigned shelves aggregated by Goodreads, so they reflect how readers categorise a book rather than a formal taxonomy.
• Turning on includeDescription adds a request per book and slows larger runs.