TL;DR: Is anyone still using library- and book-related APIs? If you could
have an API to anything known to LibraryThing, what would you want?

I'm revamping LibraryThing's APIs, and am interested in what the Code4Lib
community is thinking about APIs and mashups today. Is anyone doing
anything interesting, or is this an idea from the past?

On the one hand, I remember the heady days of cool book APIs and library
mashups. I contributed a chapter to Nicole Engard's book "Library Mashups."
I want to be part of a supportive community of people doing cool things.
Making new APIs for that is worth it to me.

On the other, LibraryThing has had to shut down many of its free APIs
because they saw almost no "good" use—just a lot of abusive scraping. I
want to make cool APIs for library- and book-people doing interesting
things with books. I don't want to help jerks with crappy or dangerous
"free ebook" sites populate their data. Whatever we do, it has to have
clear limits.

So what's your feeling?

Secondarily, if you had access to everything LibraryThing knows—twenty
years of direct and implied user data about books, some 70m MARC records(1)
and so forth—what would you want an API to? We sell some of what he have
already, in services like Syndetics Unbound(2), and we aren't going to
provide free APIs to a paid product, but there's a lot we can do for
libraries without any commercial concerns.

Best,
Tim
LibraryThing