Book Scraper for Notion Page
The point of this project was to make my Notion library a little more easy to manage. I like to write little book reports summarizing the book I just read in my Notion. This automation code uses Playwright to scrape Goodreads, a dynamic website, for the book of your choosing. When the script runs, it asks you for a Goodreads link to scrape. Then, it creates a page in your Notion for you to fill out about the book.
Here is an example of a created page in Notion after scraping Goodreads for the book “After I Do” by Taylor Jenkins Reid:
You will have to input your Notion credentials and create an integration key to use this script. I detail this process in the README.txt file within the GitHub repository, if you would like to use it. It isn’t a hard process, but it can be confusing for sure. Please reach out with any questions via the repo on GitHub!
Honestly, this project was really just for fun. I use it every time I finish a new book, so it does not go unused. I think it truly does save me time when writing my reports: no longer do I have to double check the author’s name, or grab the book cover from Google. It was a chance for me to practice using APIs within my code, and I definitely learned a lot in the process. I found reading the documentation to be super helpful in developing this script, alongside understanding the layout of a website.
My Notion library full of pages that I created using the scraper:
An Aside
Originally, I had used BeautifulSoup and made the script in Python. However, this code eventually broke when Goodreads changed their website layout. The original script was only meant to be used on a static site. When I learned how I could get information from dynamic websites, I decided to just use Playwright as the scraper, because then all of my code could be in Javascript (the Notion API code I use is already in Javascript). Having it all be in one language was just simplier for me to develop, especially because it was such a tiny project.