LibraryThing API: Mashup The Library

John Musser, February 13th, 2008

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One of newest API directory listings is the LibraryThing API, a programmable interface to the popular book lovers site LibraryThing. The service, started as a personal project by Tim Spalding allows users to catalog their book collections now has over 23 million entries. In 2006 Abe’s Books bought a 40% interest in the company. Earlier this month the site was a pick over at the Wall Street Journal which points out that the site has 350,000 members, indexes for 252 international and 39 US libraries, and has over 700,000 user-uploaded book covers.

The API is a fairly straightforward REST API with three primary methods:

• thingLang: a “a simple, pragmatic API for determining the language of a book. thingLang uses LibraryThing’s MARC records, when it can. When it can’t it uses the Group Identifiers embedded at the start of the ISBN format. Rather than returning XML, which–ssh!–I don’t really like, LibraryThing returns a naked three-letter string, following the MARC standard.” Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingLang.php?isbn=2070525570 (Harry Potter in French). Tim’s blog post on this includes some interesting, obscure trivia about ISBN’s.
• thingTitle: Feed it a title and it will return all the ISBNs from the most likely LibraryThing “work,” the LibraryThing title and a link to the LibraryThing work page. It should prove useful for people who have uncontrolled, ratty or ISBN-less data.” Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingTitle/The Hobbit.
• thingISBN: Given a specific ISBN, this method will return a list of associated ISBN’s. Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0553212583 (Wuthering Heights).