Web scraping is a powerful tool for gathering data from websites. Whether you’re collecting product reviews, tracking prices, or, in our case, scraping Goodreads books, web scraping provides endless opportunities for data-driven applications.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the fundamentals of web scraping, the power of the Python BeautifulSoup library, and break down a Python script designed to scrape Goodreads Choice Awards data. Finally, we’ll discuss how to store this data in a CSV file for further analysis or applications.

What is Goodreads?

Goodreads is the world’s largest platform for readers and book recommendations. It provides users with access to book reviews, author details, and popular rankings. Every year, Goodreads hosts the Goodreads Choice Awards, where readers vote for their favorite books across various genres like fiction, fantasy, romance, and more. This makes Goodreads an ideal target for web scraping to gather insights about trending books and authors.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping involves extracting data from websites in an automated manner. It allows you to collect and structure information for tasks such as:

• Analyzing trends and patterns.
• Aggregating content like reviews or articles.
• Feeding machine learning models or databases.

Setting Up Your Environment

Before diving into the script, you need to install the necessary libraries.

1. Install Python

   Make sure you have Python installed on your system.

2. Install Required Libraries

   Install the required libraries using pip:
   

   pip install beautifulsoup4
   pip install requests
   

   request: Allows us to send HTTP requests to a URL and retrieve the web page’s content.

   BeautifulSoup: Simplifies HTML parsing and data extraction.

Once these installations are complete, you're ready to scraping!

Introduction to BeautifulSoup

BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It enables developers to navigate page structures, extract content, and transform raw HTML into a structured format.

Key Methods in BeautifulSoup

Here are a few essential methods that we will be using in our script:

• BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser'): Initializes the parser and allows you to work with the HTML content.
• soup.select(selector): Finds elements using CSS selectors, such as classes or tags.
• soup.find(class_='class_name'): Locates the first occurrence of an element with a specified class.
• soup.find_parent(class_='class_name'): Finds the parent tag of the current element.
• soup.get('attribute'): Retrieves the value of an attribute from an element, like href or src.

For a complete list of methods, check out the BeautifulSoup documentation.

Setting Up the Script

Let’s begin by importing the necessary libraries and defining custom headers to mimic a browser. This helps avoid getting blocked by the website.

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install requests

Scraping Categories and Books

We start by defining the URLs for Goodreads’ Choice Awards page and the main application. We will send a request to start_url and get the web page's content.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
import re
import csv

HEADERS = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64)...",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US, en;q=0.5",
}

Each category contains a genre and a link to its respective page. Using soup.select, we extract all categories listed under the .category class.

Next, iterate through each category to get the genre name and its page URL.

app_url = "https://www.goodreads.com"
start_url = "https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2024"

res = requests.get(start_url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = bs(res.text, 'html.parser')

categories = soup.select('.category')

Here, we extract the category name (genre) and the category page URL for further processing.

We will send another request to each category_url and locate all the books under that category.

for index, category in enumerate(categories):
    genre = category.select('h4.category__copy')[0].text.strip()
    url = category.select('a')[0].get('href')
    category_url = f"{app_url}{url}"

category_books will contain the list of all the books under the respective category.

Extracting Book Data

Once we have the list of books, we will be iterating over each books and extract the data.

Extract Votes

res = requests.get(category_url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = bs(res.text, 'html.parser')

category_books = soup.select('.resultShown a.pollAnswer__bookLink')

If we see in the DOM, voting count is present in the parent element of the category element. So we need to use find_parent method to locate the element and extract the voting count.

Extract Book Title, Author and Image URL

for book_index, book in enumerate(category_books):
    parent_tag = book.find_parent(class_='resultShown')
    votes = parent_tag.find(class_='result').text.strip()
    book_votes = clean_string(votes).split(" ")[0].replace(",", "")

Each book's URL, cover image URL, title and author are extracted.

The clean_string function ensures the title is neatly formatted. You can define it at the top of the script

book_url = book.get('href')
book_url_formatted = f"{app_url}{book_url}"
book_img = book.find('img')
book_img_url = book_img.get('src')
book_img_alt = book_img.get('alt')
book_title = clean_string(book_img_alt)
print(book_title)
book_name = book_title.split('by')[0].strip()
book_author = book_title.split('by')[1].strip()

Extract More Book Details

To get more details about the book like rating, reviews, etc., we will be sending another request to book_url_formatted.

def clean_string(string):
    cleaned = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', string).strip()
    return cleaned

Here get_ratings_reviews returns the ratings and reviews text well formatted.

You can define this function at the top of the script.

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install requests

By navigating to each book’s details page, additional information like ratings, reviews, and detailed descriptions is extracted. Here, we are also checking if book description element exists otherwise putting a default description so that the script does not fails.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
import re
import csv

HEADERS = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64)...",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US, en;q=0.5",
}

Here, we have also gathered author details, publication information and other metadata.

Create a Book Dictionary

Let's store all the data we have extracted for a book in a dictionary.

app_url = "https://www.goodreads.com"
start_url = "https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2024"

res = requests.get(start_url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = bs(res.text, 'html.parser')

categories = soup.select('.category')

We will use this dictionary to add the data in a csv file.

Storing Data in a CSV File

We will use the csv module which is a part of Python's standard library. So you don't need to install it separately.

First we need to check if this is the first entry. This check is required to add the header in the csv file in the first row.

for index, category in enumerate(categories):
    genre = category.select('h4.category__copy')[0].text.strip()
    url = category.select('a')[0].get('href')
    category_url = f"{app_url}{url}"

We are using mode="w" which will create a new csv file with the header entry.

Now for all subsequent entries, we will append the data to the CSV file:

res = requests.get(category_url, headers=HEADERS)
soup = bs(res.text, 'html.parser')

category_books = soup.select('.resultShown a.pollAnswer__bookLink')

mode="a" will append the data to CSV file.

Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy a cup of coffee ?? while the script runs.

Once it’s done, the final data will look like this:

You can find the complete source code in this github repository.

Summary

We have learned how to scrape Goodreads data using Python and BeautifulSoup. Starting from basic setup to storing data in a CSV file, we explored every aspect of the scraping process. The scraped data can be used for:

• Data visualization (e.g., most popular genres or authors).
• Machine learning models to predict book popularity.
• Building personal book recommendation systems.

Web scraping opens up possibilities for creative data analysis and applications. With libraries like BeautifulSoup, even complex scraping tasks become manageable. Just remember to follow ethical practices and respect the website’s terms of service while scraping!

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