Murder by Death

As many of you know, I discovered Penguin Random House allows the public to query its database and get a data dump of its back/front lists, and I wrote a program that auto-populates the Add New Book page with this data, allowing me to bulk add books when I have time (I still have to manually select authors and submit each page, so it's not fully automated).

Well, there's another type of access to their database that allows you to get a lot more specific information, like tailoring your requests to specific imprints, languages, etc. but it required a developers key, called an API key, which is generally only given to real developers writing applications, but I figured 'what the hell' and applied anyway.  

I got approved!  Squee!  (I am such. a. nerd.)

The data dump is in a totally different format, which meant I had to re-write all my clean-up scripts, which took forever but was worth it.  After writing a lot of statements that look like:

^[[:blank:]]{2,}"([a-zA_Z]+)":   and  ^[s]+"p(?!roj)(?!a)(?s).*?"

I can now create a program-ready spreadsheet (whereas before I had to use an online service to convert the cleaned up files).

THE BEST PART is that I can tailor requests to Penguin Random House to narrow in on specific imprints AND whether or not there's a cover for the book.

EVEN BETTER:  the data includes the full URL to the cover, which I kept, and have set up to extract to a new file, so I can then post those after they've been added.  So for those lovely, wonderful people who have been contributing to the effort of adding book covers, they're now just a click away.  For example, a few I added as a test:

https://images.randomhouse.com/cover/9780451491725

https://images.randomhouse.com/cover/9781984803184

I haven't even scratched the surface of insane things I can tailor the data for, but the very best part is that this will allow me to play the odds - if I know which imprints y'all tend to read the most, I can make sure those get done when I have the time to do this, increasing the chances that the books you'll be looking for are the ones I'm adding.

So - let me know:  do you have Penguin/Random House imprints you tend to read more of than others?  Berkely?  Knopf?  Let me know and I'll put them at the top of my list.  :)