NYT API

Introduction

For this assignment, I am using the NYT Books API specifically the overview.json endpoint. Unlike a single category list, I chose the overview because it provides a snapshot of all the Best Sellers lists for a given week. My goal is to find out which book is currently holding the top spot across all categories the longest ? Using the overview service, I can compare # 1 hits across all the genres on the list.

Approach

I am using the modern httr2 package to handle the API request. This allows for a piped workflow where I define the request, add my API key as a query parameter, and perform the request. Because the overview endpoint returns a nested list structure (lists within results), I use resp_body_json() and tidyr::unnest() to flatten the data into a usable data frame.

Challenges

One challenge I anticipate is working with the nested JSON structure returned by the overview.json endpoint. The response includes multiple bestseller lists inside the results object, and each list contains its own set of books, so I will need to carefully flatten that structure into a tidy data frame. Another challenge is deciding the right unit of analysis for my question. Since I want to compare the current #1 books across all categories, I will need to isolate only the top-ranked book from each list and then compare those books based on how many weeks they have remained on the list. I also expect that some fields may be blank or inconsistent across categories, which may require light cleaning before analysis.

library(httr2)

nyt_key <- Sys.getenv("NYT_API_KEY")

response <- request("https://api.nytimes.com/svc/books/v3/lists/overview.json") |> 
  req_url_query(`api-key` = nyt_key) |>
  req_perform()