Did a bit more digging, we can sort the API by ID and iterate through that way by increasing the offset parameter:

https://librivox.org/api/feed/audiobooks?sort_field=id&offset=2

The API responds quickly even with high offsets (https://librivox.org/api/feed/audiobooks?sort_field=id&sort_order=desc&offset=18000) so I'm not worried that we would cause a problem if we slowly crawled the API in this way. It also returns JSON responses if you set the content type header to application/json.

There is code to check a rate limit but based on that code, it doesn't seem like it applies to the API as there's no limit defined on the feed controller. In any case, we should still get an API key for this if we do it.

Note that the API returns results for works that haven't yet been reviewed by the LibriVox folks, so we would need to check that url_librivox exists for the work before including it.

Additionally, there are further complications regarding how we would present these results. Specifically, what will be considered the "unit" of a single "work" that we would show in results? One audiobook recording can include many readers for different sections (see https://librivox.org/der-abenteuerliche-simplicissimus-teutsch-teil-1-by-hans-jakob-christoffel-von-grimmelshausen/ as an example). That means we can't include individual books as the result without flattening the attribution. To make matters worse, however, the API doesn't have any way (as far as I can tell) to retrieve the readers for sections of a work. You can get the list of sections for an audio book but it does not list the readers (https://librivox.org/api/feed/audiotracks?project_id=2999).

I don't know whether attribution of the recording would need the reader, however, or if it should be attributed to the author of the work being read.

Librivox #1290

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sgdwnopenedon Feb 12, 2023

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sgdwn
openedon Feb 12, 2023