Hi everyone! I'm in the process of developing an app that's intended to be an ethical alternative to Goodreads, focusing on supporting local bookstores instead of big online retailers like Amazon. We're really close to launching, but I've hit a tricky issue that I'm hoping you all can help me with.
The app allows users to search for authors and explore their complete catalog of books. However, when I search for certain authors, like Elin Hilderbrand, I only get a handful of results or even weird summaries that don't match my expectations. For instance, she's authored 31 books, but when I run a query, I only see a maximum of 13 titles. My app developer has been communicating with the database provider, Nielsen, but they keep pointing fingers at each other. As a non-technical founder, I'm trying to figure out what the real issue might be.
Here's a snippet from my developer's inquiry to Nielsen about the problem:
"We are encountering an issue with the BDOL REST API when attempting to retrieve the full bibliography for author Elin Hilderbrand... Despite trying different combinations of field, value, logic, and resultView parameters, the maximum number of results received remains 13. Could you please advise whether additional parameters are required to retrieve the full list of 31 titles?"
If anyone has insights or suggestions on how to troubleshoot this, I would really appreciate it!
5 Answers
Have you thought about checking other book databases like Google Books or Open Library? It might help to compare results with those APIs and see if Nielsen is a must for your app, or if you could switch to something else that might provide better data.
You might want to try querying a different author, like Stephen King, and see how many results you get. I did some tests and got about 20 results, but there was a lot of junk in there too. It seems like filtering is a separate issue, but it might tell you if the problem is specific to certain authors.
It sounds like this could be more of a data issue from Nielsen's side rather than your developer's query setup. Have you considered reaching out directly to Nielsen for clarification? They should be able to tell you if they have 31 books listed or if it's just a problem with how the data is being accessed.
The chances are that something is off with the API or how it handles your queries. If you're consistently only getting 13 results, it could be pagination. You might need to make multiple calls to retrieve all the data. Try different authors to see if they also hit that limit or if it's just Hilderbrand.
That makes sense. I’ll test out some other authors and see how it goes. I'll keep you posted on what I find!
It’s worth trying your query without the extra parameters like indexType and format. Sometimes simplifying the request can lead to different results. It might look something like this: `curl --location '...BDOLrequest?clientId=XXXX&password=XXXX&from=0&to=100&field0=2&value0=Elin%20Hilderbrand'`. That could change up what you're getting back.
I'll definitely give that a shot! Thanks for the suggestion!
I've checked, and I do get around 20 results for Stephen King, but there's quite a mix of unrelated stuff like coloring books and calendars. So, maybe filtering out the irrelevant ones is another hurdle to tackle.