Comments about LibriVox? Suggestions to improve things? News?
LibriVox is rebuilding its API. If you are planning, or already have, built apps or web services on the LibriVox catalog, please post here so we know who you are & also, pls monitor this thread.
We'd like you to test, and give us feedback.
If you have questions/comments/feedback/thoughts, please post them in this forum thread.
I use LibriVox API to update the information at the following pages.
I request readers information is included.
Another request is to provide information for sections.
Information about readers, recording time & language.
- eg. in the case where a book has multiple works in it, such as "Short Story Collection #987"
So, you would like a parameter: ?work_id=123 which would return all the books related to a single work group?
Those are the main things that come to mind. I will post any additional thoughts as they come along. I've taken the alpha API for a little spin, and it looks like it is coming along well!
If we are in the process of fixing things shouldn't we be aiming for co-relation and consistency?
Project URL used for the Librivox URL and WIKI URL be used for the Wiki URL ??
It is probably too late in the process, but never hurts to ask?
Sorry to be slow in responding! I thought that I had this thread marked to notify me on changes, but apparently, I didn't.
Regarding works, I would like to be able to access things smaller than a book directly. I think there is some support for that in the database already, as search results return works that are inside a larger collection. For example, I just looked and there is a story entitled "Laura" by Saki in the first Ghost Story Collection. I would like to be able to have a unique identifier (like the ones for the books) that I could use to reference that story, access it by paging through all the works, and even have a way to attach additional metadata to it - like a description, and maybe even an image. It seems to me that most people would prefer to access the story individually, as opposed to seeing it as part of a group of other stories that happen to be bundled into that particular collection.
I'm glad to hear about the reader data being added!
Thanks for all you are doing! Keep up the good work!
Let me explain what I need.
For a solo project current API is OK. We need new API for Collections.
That somewhat corresponds with my thought about "works". Sometimes a "book" is a single work by a single reader, sometimes it is a single work by multiple readers, and sometimes it is multiple works by multiple readers. We use the same section / chapter concept to represent both chapters in a book and multiple works in a collection of books. I don't know if there is anything in the existing database that distinguishes between the two, but if there is, it would be great to have access to it, and if not, it would be nice to at least have a way to add that functionality.
Same with genres, I don't seem to be able to perform a genre search with the new API.
Thanks a lot for the hard work.
Another note on the idea of "works" that I've been talking about. I've mostly been emphasizing the case where there are multiple works in a book, but there is also the case where a single work spans multiple books. For example, Les Miserables spans 5 books. It would be good to have a way to access them as a single entity.
tbook wrote: For example, Les Miserables spans 5 books. It would be good to have a way to access them as a single entity.
We have the concept of grouping volumes now, I don't know if it appears in the API in any way but it seems like it would be helpful.
Thanks for the response! It would be great to get that into the API.
Grouping is used for other things too Cori - so we would have to have some way of differentiating between War and Peace in 15 parts and the short story collections - all 50 odd of them and something like the Trollope Palliser series for example.
Oh, I'd not thought about that, thanks Anne! Not sure what to suggest, then.