Scrape book pages on goodreads.com

About goodreads.com

goodreads.com describes itself as “Find and read more books you’ll love, and keep track of the books you want to read. Be part of the world’s largest community of book lovers on Goodreads”.

Its robots.txt names 16 sitemaps and disallows 12 paths, among them /admin, /api, /ebooks. It asks crawlers to wait 5s between requests.

Measured on Crawlbase

Success rate over every request from every account in August 2026: 99.4%. Patterns, countries and failures come from the request log since 14 Aug 2026; 97.5% of successful calls used the JavaScript token and the median answer took 10.0s.

Among the 3 books and audio sites in the Cookbook, goodreads.com ranks 2 of 3 by success rate; the category median is 99.4%. Its median answer of 10.0s sits at the category median of 10.0s. 1 of the 3 accept the plain token; this one needs the JavaScript token.

The call

Product pages are the shape the accounts fetch most here, with the country and token that succeed most often. Replace the placeholder path with a real product URL from the site.

curl "https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_JS_TOKEN&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fbook%2Fexample-section%2Fexample-page"

from crawlbase import CrawlingAPI
api = CrawlingAPI({'token': 'YOUR_JS_TOKEN'})

r = api.get('https://www.goodreads.com/book/example-section/example-page')
html = r['body']

const { CrawlingAPI } = require('crawlbase');
const api = new CrawlingAPI({ token: 'YOUR_JS_TOKEN' });

const r = await api.get('https://www.goodreads.com/book/example-section/example-page');

Parameters that matter

URL patterns accounts fetch

Fields you get

A product page usually carries an ld+json Product block with name, price, currency and availability, and the same values in the visible markup. Read the block first; it changes less often than the layout.

What breaks, and the fix

Of the failures since 14 Aug 2026, the site answered:

Run it on a schedule

A catalogue refresh is a list of product URLs. Push it to the Crawler with a callback, let it pace the calls and retry what the site refuses, and read the results from Cloud Storage. The median answer on this site is 10.0s.

Questions

Other pages on goodreads.com

Pages goodreads.com lists in its own sitemaps, fetched by Crawlbase on 6 Sep 2026 and verified in 2 consecutive runs. Each row is the cheapest call that returned the page with its content.