Is it legal to scrape Good Books?

Scraping publicly available data from Good Books is generally legal for personal or research use, provided you do not violate their Terms of Service. However, you should avoid redistributing the data in a way that directly competes with the website's core business or harms their performance.

Does Good Books have an official API?

As of current findings, Good Books does not offer a public official API for developers. The best way to access their data programmatically is through web scraping or using automated extraction tools like Automatio.

How can I avoid getting blocked while scraping Good Books?

To avoid being blocked, you should use a user-agent that mimics a real web browser and implement rate limiting to ensure you aren't sending too many requests per minute. While the site is generally open, excessive traffic from a single IP can trigger automated security measures.

What format is the scraped data usually in?

Using tools like Automatio, you can export the data into structured formats like CSV, JSON, or directly into a Google Sheet. This makes it easy to import the information into a database or use it for further analysis.

How often should I scrape Good Books?

The platform is updated periodically as new books and influencers are added. For most use cases, a weekly or monthly update cycle is sufficient to capture the latest recommendations without putting unnecessary load on the site's servers.

Do I need to render JavaScript to scrape this site?

Good Books is built on Webflow and generally serves static HTML for its lists and detail pages. Basic scrapers like BeautifulSoup can extract most data, although headless browsers like Playwright are better for handling certain navigation interactions.

Can I scrape the purchase links to Amazon?

Yes, you can extract the outbound URLs associated with each book. These are typically stored in the 'href' attribute of the 'Buy on Amazon' or 'Buy on Apple Books' buttons found on the individual book detail pages.

How do I map books to their recommenders?

The most efficient way is to scrape the book detail page, which lists all individuals who recommended that specific title. Alternatively, you can scrape the 'People' section and associate books listed under each individual's profile.

How to Scrape Good Books | Good Books Web Scraper

Learn how to scrape Good Books (goodbooks.io) to extract over 9,500 expert book recommendations. Get titles, authors, and influencer lists for market research.

Start Scraping Free

goodbooks.ioEasy

Coverage:Global

Available Data7 fields

TitleDescriptionImagesSeller InfoPosting DateCategoriesAttributes

All Extractable Fields

Book TitleAuthor NameBook CategoryRecommendation CountRecommender NameRecommender IndustryBook Cover Image URLAmazon Purchase LinkApple Books LinkBlog Post TitleIndustry CategoryTop 100 Rank

Technical Requirements

Static HTML

No Login

Has Pagination

No Official API

Anti-Bot Protection Detected

Rate LimitingNone detected

About Good Books

Learn what Good Books offers and what valuable data can be extracted from it.

The Authority on Expert Recommendations

Good Books is a curated digital platform that aggregates book recommendations from some of the world's most successful and influential individuals. Founded with the mission to help people discover quality literature, it features reading lists from entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, activists like Oprah Winfrey, and authors like James Clear. The platform serves as a massive repository of expert-approved knowledge, spanning thousands of titles across diverse genres.

Structured Intellectual Data

The website organizes its data into four main pillars: books, people, industries, and curated lists. Users can explore specific categories such as business, science, or fiction, or browse the reading habits of individuals in specific sectors like venture capital or media. Each book entry typically includes the title, author, and a list of specific individuals who have endorsed it, often with links to major retailers like Amazon and Apple Books.

Why Scrape Good Books?

Scraping Good Books is highly valuable for building recommendation engines, performing competitive research on intellectual trends, or creating niche content for bibliophiles. Since the data is tied to high-profile figures, it provides a unique layer of social proof and authority that standard bookstore metadata lacks. Aggregating this information allows for deep analysis into what the world's thinkers are reading and recommending.

Why Scrape Good Books?

Discover the business value and use cases for extracting data from Good Books.

Build a high-authority book recommendation database for affiliate marketing

Identify trending topics and genres among global thought leaders

Track the reading habits of specific industry icons like Warren Buffett or Naval Ravikant

Aggregate 'Top 100' lists for content creation and social media curation

Perform market analysis on the most influential business and self-improvement literature

Generate lead lists of influencers and authors within specific knowledge domains

Scraping Challenges

Technical challenges you may encounter when scraping Good Books.

Handling the 'View All' navigation structure to reach all 9,500+ recommendations

Linking individual recommenders to their respective books across different URLs

Maintaining data accuracy when a book has multiple authors or varied editions

Extracting clean metadata from Webflow-specific CSS class naming conventions

Scrape Good Books with AI

No coding required. Extract data in minutes with AI-powered automation.

How It Works

Describe What You Need

Tell the AI what data you want to extract from Good Books. Just type it in plain language — no coding or selectors needed.

AI Extracts the Data

Our artificial intelligence navigates Good Books, handles dynamic content, and extracts exactly what you asked for.

Get Your Data

Receive clean, structured data ready to export as CSV, JSON, or send directly to your apps and workflows.

Why Use AI for Scraping

No-code interface allows anyone to build a scraper without technical knowledge

Automatic handling of pagination and complex navigation flows

Ability to schedule scrapes to catch new recommendations as they are added

Cloud execution allows for high-speed data extraction without local resources

Direct export options to CSV, Google Sheets, or various APIs

Start Scraping Free

No credit card requiredFree tier availableNo setup needed

No-Code Web Scrapers for Good Books

Point-and-click alternatives to AI-powered scraping

Several no-code tools like Browse.ai, Octoparse, Axiom, and ParseHub can help you scrape Good Books. These tools use visual interfaces to select elements, but they come with trade-offs compared to AI-powered solutions.

Typical Workflow with No-Code Tools

Install browser extension or sign up for the platform

Navigate to the target website and open the tool

Point-and-click to select data elements you want to extract

Configure CSS selectors for each data field

Set up pagination rules to scrape multiple pages

Handle CAPTCHAs (often requires manual solving)

Configure scheduling for automated runs

Export data to CSV, JSON, or connect via API

Common Challenges

Learning curve

Understanding selectors and extraction logic takes time

Selectors break

Website changes can break your entire workflow

Dynamic content issues

JavaScript-heavy sites often require complex workarounds

CAPTCHA limitations

Most tools require manual intervention for CAPTCHAs

IP blocking

Aggressive scraping can get your IP banned

Code Examples

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Set headers to mimic a browser
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36'
}

def scrape_goodbooks_home():
    url = 'https://goodbooks.io/'
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
        response.raise_for_status()
        
        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
        
        # Find featured books
        books = soup.find_all('div', class_='book-card-featured')
        
        for book in books:
            title = book.find('h5').get_text(strip=True) if book.find('h5') else 'N/A'
            author = book.find('h6').get_text(strip=True) if book.find('h6') else 'N/A'
            print(f'Book: {title} | Author: {author}')
            
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print(f'Error occurred: {e}')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    scrape_goodbooks_home()

When to Use

Best for static HTML pages where content is loaded server-side. The fastest and simplest approach when JavaScript rendering isn't required.

Advantages

●Fastest execution (no browser overhead)
●Lowest resource consumption
●Easy to parallelize with asyncio
●Great for APIs and static pages

Limitations

●Cannot execute JavaScript
●Fails on SPAs and dynamic content
●May struggle with complex anti-bot systems

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

def run(playwright):
    # Launch browser
    browser = playwright.chromium.launch(headless=True)
    page = browser.new_page()
    
    # Navigate to Good Books listings
    page.goto('https://goodbooks.io/books')
    
    # Wait for the book items to load
    page.wait_for_selector('.book-item')
    
    # Extract book data from the page
    books = page.query_selector_all('.book-item')
    for book in books:
        title = book.query_selector('h5').inner_text()
        author = book.query_selector('h6').inner_text()
        print(f'Scraped: {title} by {author}')
    
    # Close connection
    browser.close()

with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    run(playwright)

When to Use

Use when content loads dynamically via JavaScript, or when you need to interact with the page (clicks, scrolls, form fills). Handles modern anti-bot detection better.

Advantages

●Executes JavaScript like a real browser
●Handles SPAs and dynamic content
●Better anti-bot evasion with stealth plugins
●Can take screenshots and PDFs

Limitations

●Slower than HTTP requests
●Higher memory/CPU usage
●More complex to set up

import scrapy

class GoodbooksSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'goodbooks'
    allowed_domains = ['goodbooks.io']
    start_urls = ['https://goodbooks.io/books']

    def parse(self, response):
        # Extract details for each book item
        for book in response.css('.book-item-class'):
            yield {
                'title': book.css('h5::text').get(),
                'author': book.css('h6::text').get(),
                'url': response.urljoin(book.css('a::attr(href)').get()),
            }

        # Handle simple pagination link
        next_page = response.css('a.next-page-selector::attr(href)').get()
        if next_page:
            yield response.follow(next_page, self.parse)

When to Use

Ideal for large-scale crawling projects that need to scrape thousands of pages. Built-in support for rate limiting, retries, and data pipelines.

Advantages

●Built for scale (millions of pages)
●Automatic request throttling
●Built-in data export pipelines
●Middleware system for proxies/headers

Limitations

●Steeper learning curve
●Overkill for small projects
●No native JavaScript rendering

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  
  await page.goto('https://goodbooks.io/top-100/all-books');
  
  // Ensure cards are rendered
  await page.waitForSelector('.book-card');

  const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
    const items = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.book-card'));
    return items.map(item => ({
      title: item.querySelector('h5') ? item.querySelector('h5').innerText : 'N/A',
      author: item.querySelector('h6') ? item.querySelector('h6').innerText : 'N/A'
    }));
  });

  console.log(data);
  await browser.close();
})();

When to Use

Choose this if you're in a Node.js/JavaScript ecosystem or need tight integration with frontend tools. Similar capabilities to Playwright.

Advantages

●Native JavaScript/TypeScript support
●Chrome DevTools Protocol access
●Large ecosystem and community
●Good for JS-heavy projects

Limitations

●Chrome-only (vs Playwright's multi-browser)
●Similar overhead to Playwright
●Less mature stealth options

How to Scrape Good Books with Code

Python + Requests

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Set headers to mimic a browser
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36'
}

def scrape_goodbooks_home():
    url = 'https://goodbooks.io/'
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
        response.raise_for_status()
        
        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
        
        # Find featured books
        books = soup.find_all('div', class_='book-card-featured')
        
        for book in books:
            title = book.find('h5').get_text(strip=True) if book.find('h5') else 'N/A'
            author = book.find('h6').get_text(strip=True) if book.find('h6') else 'N/A'
            print(f'Book: {title} | Author: {author}')
            
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print(f'Error occurred: {e}')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    scrape_goodbooks_home()

Python + Playwright

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

def run(playwright):
    # Launch browser
    browser = playwright.chromium.launch(headless=True)
    page = browser.new_page()
    
    # Navigate to Good Books listings
    page.goto('https://goodbooks.io/books')
    
    # Wait for the book items to load
    page.wait_for_selector('.book-item')
    
    # Extract book data from the page
    books = page.query_selector_all('.book-item')
    for book in books:
        title = book.query_selector('h5').inner_text()
        author = book.query_selector('h6').inner_text()
        print(f'Scraped: {title} by {author}')
    
    # Close connection
    browser.close()

with sync_playwright() as playwright:
    run(playwright)

Python + Scrapy

import scrapy

class GoodbooksSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'goodbooks'
    allowed_domains = ['goodbooks.io']
    start_urls = ['https://goodbooks.io/books']

    def parse(self, response):
        # Extract details for each book item
        for book in response.css('.book-item-class'):
            yield {
                'title': book.css('h5::text').get(),
                'author': book.css('h6::text').get(),
                'url': response.urljoin(book.css('a::attr(href)').get()),
            }

        # Handle simple pagination link
        next_page = response.css('a.next-page-selector::attr(href)').get()
        if next_page:
            yield response.follow(next_page, self.parse)

Node.js + Puppeteer

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  
  await page.goto('https://goodbooks.io/top-100/all-books');
  
  // Ensure cards are rendered
  await page.waitForSelector('.book-card');

  const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
    const items = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.book-card'));
    return items.map(item => ({
      title: item.querySelector('h5') ? item.querySelector('h5').innerText : 'N/A',
      author: item.querySelector('h6') ? item.querySelector('h6').innerText : 'N/A'
    }));
  });

  console.log(data);
  await browser.close();
})();

What You Can Do With Good Books Data

Explore practical applications and insights from Good Books data.

Curated Book Subscription Service

Startups can use the data to create a niche book-of-the-month club based on successful people's reading habits.

How to implement:

1Scrape top-recommended books in 'Business' and 'Self-Improvement'.
2Cross-reference books that appear in multiple high-profile reading lists.
3Set up a monthly subscription providing the most-recommended book of that period.
4Include digital summaries highlighting why billionaires recommended it.

Use Automatio to extract data from Good Books and build these applications without writing code.

More than just prompts

Supercharge your workflow with AI Automation

Automatio combines the power of AI agents, web automation, and smart integrations to help you accomplish more in less time.

AI Agents

Web Automation

Smart Workflows

Get Started Free

Pro Tips for Scraping Good Books

Expert advice for successfully extracting data from Good Books.

Focus on the 'Top 100' and 'People' sections first to capture the most high-value data quickly.

Webflow sites often use specific data attributes; inspect elements to see if hidden metadata like IDs is available.

Implement a delay of 1-3 seconds between requests to avoid triggering basic rate limits on the hosting server.

Use a residential proxy if you plan to scrape all 9,500+ items in a single session.

Clean the author strings to remove 'by' or multiple author joins for better database normalization.

Monitor the blog section for new reading lists that might not have been added to the main directory yet.

Testimonials

What Our Users Say

Join thousands of satisfied users who have transformed their workflow

Jonathan Kogan

Co-Founder/CEO, rpatools.io

Automatio is one of the most used for RPA Tools both internally and externally. It saves us countless hours of work and we realized this could do the same for other startups and so we choose Automatio for most of our automation needs.

Mohammed Ibrahim

CEO, qannas.pro

I have used many tools over the past 5 years, Automatio is the Jack of All trades.. !! it could be your scraping bot in the morning and then it becomes your VA by the noon and in the evening it does your automations.. its amazing!

Ben Bressington

CTO, AiChatSolutions

Automatio is fantastic and simple to use to extract data from any website. This allowed me to replace a developer and do tasks myself as they only take a few minutes to setup and forget about it. Automatio is a game changer!

Sarah Chen

Head of Growth, ScaleUp Labs

We've tried dozens of automation tools, but Automatio stands out for its flexibility and ease of use. Our team productivity increased by 40% within the first month of adoption.

David Park

Founder, DataDriven.io

The AI-powered features in Automatio are incredible. It understands context and adapts to changes in websites automatically. No more broken scrapers!

Emily Rodriguez

Marketing Director, GrowthMetrics

Automatio transformed our lead generation process. What used to take our team days now happens automatically in minutes. The ROI is incredible.

Jonathan Kogan

Co-Founder/CEO, rpatools.io

Mohammed Ibrahim

CEO, qannas.pro

Ben Bressington

CTO, AiChatSolutions

Sarah Chen

Head of Growth, ScaleUp Labs

We've tried dozens of automation tools, but Automatio stands out for its flexibility and ease of use. Our team productivity increased by 40% within the first month of adoption.

David Park

Founder, DataDriven.io

The AI-powered features in Automatio are incredible. It understands context and adapts to changes in websites automatically. No more broken scrapers!

Emily Rodriguez

Marketing Director, GrowthMetrics

Automatio transformed our lead generation process. What used to take our team days now happens automatically in minutes. The ROI is incredible.

Related Web Scraping

Frequently Asked Questions About Good Books

Find answers to common questions about Good Books

How to Scrape Good Books | Good Books Web Scraper

About Good Books

The Authority on Expert Recommendations

Structured Intellectual Data

Why Scrape Good Books?

Why Scrape Good Books?

Scraping Challenges

Scrape Good Books with AI

How It Works

Why Use AI for Scraping

How to scrape with AI:

Why use AI for scraping:

No-Code Web Scrapers for Good Books

Typical Workflow with No-Code Tools

Common Challenges

No-Code Web Scrapers for Good Books

Typical Workflow with No-Code Tools

Common Challenges

Code Examples

How to Scrape Good Books with Code

Python + Requests

Python + Playwright

Python + Scrapy

Node.js + Puppeteer

What You Can Do With Good Books Data

Curated Book Subscription Service

AI Recommendation Engine

Content Strategy for Thought Leaders

Affiliate Niche Website

Market Trend Analysis

What You Can Do With Good Books Data

Supercharge your workflow with AI Automation

Pro Tips for Scraping Good Books

What Our Users Say

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Frequently Asked Questions About Good Books

Is it legal to scrape Good Books?

Does Good Books have an official API?

How can I avoid getting blocked while scraping Good Books?

What format is the scraped data usually in?

How often should I scrape Good Books?

Do I need to render JavaScript to scrape this site?

Can I scrape the purchase links to Amazon?

How do I map books to their recommenders?