Search Goodreads Bookmarklet

Feb 4, 2019 javascript

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When people suggest books to you, it’s common that they’ll send you a link to Amazon. If it’s a good book, I want to add it to my Goodreads list so I remember to read it later. This has been a pretty manual process, and that bothered me. I looked and found some Google Chrome extensions, but those didn’t seem to work for me anymore. So, I created my own bookmarklet.

tldr; Drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, click it when you’re on an Amazon book page, and it’ll open a new tab with the Goodreads page for that book.

Search Goodreads

Here is the source code for it.

(function () {
  let t = document.querySelector('#productDetailsTable');
  let i = t.innerHTML.match(/\d{3}\-\d{9,}/);
  if (i.length) {
    let u = 'https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=' + i;
    window.open(u);
  } else {
    alert('Can not find ISBN');
  }
})();

This is a self-executing function in javascript. It attempts to find the productDetailsTable id and get the inner HTML from that. If it can find an ISBN-13 format type number, it assumes that’s the ISBN and opens a new tab executing a search. Goodreads will automatically take you to the book page if it finds a search with just an ISBN. If Amazon changes their page layout or you’re not on a book page, it’ll alert you that it can’t find the ISBN.