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eleybourn / Book-Catalogue

A book cataloging tool for Android phones.
https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue/wiki
GNU General Public License v3.0
383 stars 186 forks source link

Yet Another Field: Lexile value #489

Open Grunthos opened 11 years ago

Grunthos commented 11 years ago

From a user:

I am a teacher and I use your app in my classroom every day! I love having an easy way to loan books from my classroom library. In education, Lexile scores are used to determine what books are appropriately challenging for a given student. Every book gets a lexile score. I would love to be able to search my library by lexile score!

Grunthos commented 11 years ago

I have sent an email to lexile.com asking about APIs. Won't hold my breath.

Adding this in a useful way:

would be non-trivial, but potentially very useful to teachers.

Grunthos commented 11 years ago

FWIW, this is the email that was sent. No reply so far:

Hi,

I work on a free and open source Book Catalogue app for android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eleybourn.bookcatalogue&hl=en

and I recently received an enquiry from a user about associating books with Lexile values. Since we have a non-trivial number of school teachers in our user base thought it might be more broadly useful.

Looking at your site, it seems you allow database downloads via a license agreement, but I do not really want to ship what I assume would be a massive database to each user. It would also get out of date fast.

Which leads to the question: do you have an API or some other means we could use to automatically get this data when a user adds a book to their database?

eg. something like calling the web address:

lexile.com/api/getLexile?isbn=some-isbn

or lexile.com/api/getLexile?author=some-author&title=some-title

would ideally return an XML response containing the data or a flag indicating the book was not found.

This is just an example; any kind of automatable access would be great.

Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks,

...me