Author info missing from API

[angelxmoreno]

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M/Atomic_Habits has two authors but https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M.json does not show authors.

Evidence / Screenshot (if possible)

Relevant url?

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M/Atomic_Habits https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M.json

Steps to Reproduce

1. My api client fetched https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0735211299.json
2. The request was redirected to https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M.json
3. No author property was found
4. I manually went to https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32336498M
5. I noticed the author data is in fact there

What actually happened after these steps? What did you expect to happen?

• Actual: No author data in the API
• Expected: api data to match html page and include author names

Details

• Logged in (Y/N)? No
• Browser type/version? API using Guzzle (PHP) and web using Chrome
• Operating system? MacOs
• Environment (prod/dev/local)? prod

Proposal & Constraints

I do not know.

Related files

None that I am aware of.

Stakeholders

not sure

[tfmorris]

The HTML page isn't aligned with the JSON endpoint data. It's a mishmash of data from different places.

Authors are associated with works, so you need to follow the link from the edition to the work and look there. In this case: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17930368W.json

If you want author names too (likely), you'll then need to follow the individual author links to get the names. You'll probably want to cache this information to keep from having to chase the links all the time.

[cdrini]

Yep, this is the nature of this API, I'm afraid. If you want a more complete record, I'd recommend the search.json endpoint. It'll include some edition data, author name, and some work data.

Eg: https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=edition_key%3AOL32336498M&mode=everything&fields=*,editions

note the fields=*,editions . This will fetch every field in our search engine, as well as the special editions field containing matching editions. I'd recommend removing the * and putting just the fields you care about there to make the output smaller/more performant/easier to work with! eg https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=edition_key%3AOL32336498M&mode=everything&fields=key,title,subtitle,author_key,author_name,editions

[mateusz-bak]

@cdrini Can you help me with related issue I have?

I query for example: https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=Pour%20la%20sociologie%20Lahire&limit=10&offset=0&mode=everything&fields=key,title,subtitle,author_key,author_name,editions,number_of_pages_median,first_publish_year,isbn,edition_key,cover_edition_key,cover_i

And the subtitle is not included in the work result, but it is present in the edition result.

I see here on the webpage https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17335916W/Pour_la_sociologie The subtitle is included for the work.

Is the subtitle taken just from the 1st edition? Is there a way to get the subtitle for work?

[cdrini]

Hi @mateusz-bak , that all looks correct. The UI of the work page chooses an edition to promote as the primary and renders the cover/title from that edition, so the subtitle is on the edition in this case.

You can see the "raw" work data by going to the JSON page for the work: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17335916W.json . There is no subtitle!

[mateusz-bak]

Thank you for the clarification @cdrini

[tfmorris]

Works don't have a subtitle field - ever. If you look at the edit form for a work, it says

Titre Utilisez le format Titre: Sous-titre pour ajouter un sous-titre.

Sometimes people add the subtitle after a colon, other times they don't, but whatever information is available is in the title field.

[cdrini]

Oh actually the stuff after the : is automatically split off into a work subtitle! So although the edit UI for works has only a single field for the title and the subtitle, when the document is saved it splits it out into the two separate fields 👍

[tfmorris]

That's odd that the edit forms are different and don't reflect the underlying data structure. Why is that?

Message ID: @.*** com>

[cdrini]

Not sure! It's been that way since before I got here.