Useful Free APIs — Books and Religious Text

John Au-Yeung - Oct 25 '20 - - Dev Community

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In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible. With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.

In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.

Bhagavad Gita API

The Bhagavad Gita API lets us access the Bhagavad Gita text all in one place.

To access the API, we need to authenticate via OAuth.

Bhagavad Gita is one of the most important Hindu religious texts.

British National Bibliography

The British National Bibliography API lets us search for book information.

It has data for journals, periodicals, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Authentication isn’t required to access this API.

Goodreads

The Goodreads API lets us access the data stored on the Goodreads website.

We can get data for authors, books, events, comments, followers, series, topics, users, reviews, and more.

Goodreads is a website with book reviews and book information.

We can access the data with an API key.

Google Books

The Google Books API lets us access data from the Google Books website.

We can use it to search for books by category, name, and more.

Also, we can add books to our own bookshelf and retrieve it.

OAuth is required to access this API.

The Library Genesis API

The Library Genesis API lets us query books by various fields.

They include title, author, and more.

Other fields that are returned include the series a book is in, periodical, language, number of pages, ISSN, color, DPI, scanned, file name, cover URL, and more.

We can also search for a book by date.

Libraries for Node.js and Python are available.

Authentication isn’t required to access this API.

Open Library

The Open Library API lets us get user and reading list data from the library.

Authentication isn’t required for accessing data.

We can also create and edit reading lists.

Penguin Publishing

The Penguin Publishing API lets us access book data for books published by Penguin Publishing.

We can use it to search for works, authors, titles, and author events.

It returns data in XML or JSON.

Authentication isn’t required to access this API.

Rig Veda

The Rig Veda API lets us access the categories, verses from ancient Indian texts.

Authentication isn’t required to access this API.

Vedic Society

The Vedic Society API lets us access data about names, places, animals, and things from Vedic literature.

Authentication isn’t required to access this API.

Conclusion

There are useful APIs to access books data and texts.

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