The Goodreads API alternative

Goodreads shut down its public API in December 2020. Keys were revoked after 30 days of inactivity, no replacement was offered, and five years later the developer demand it served still has nowhere legal to go — reading trackers, book clubs, citation tools, and research projects all lost their data source overnight.

Bookmode is being built to restore that layer properly: canonical book, edition, and author metadata with editions clustered under works, plus licensed aggregate ratings signals — average ratings and counts as attributed facts, sourced through licensed channels rather than scraping.

What maps to what

• book.show / book.isbn → ISBN and edition lookup with the full identifier graph (ISBN-10/13, LCCN, OCLC, and more)
• work.editions → work → all editions, the clustering xISBN and thingISBN used to provide before they died
• search.books → typo-tolerant title/author search
• average_rating, ratings_count → aggregate ratings restored via licensed data, attributed by source

Review text is the one thing no legitimate service can bring back — platform reviews are login-walled and legally protected. Bookmode ships the aggregate numbers and licensed editorial review sources instead.