Audible Data Is Beautiful

Audible Data Is Beautiful is a Python project that scrapes and analyzes audiobook bestseller data from Audible.com, organizing it by category and storing detailed metadata in structured JSON format. The data can then be used for statistical summaries, visualizations, or other insights.

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✨ Features

• 📦 Scrapes Audible bestsellers by category
• 📄 Parses rich audiobook metadata: title, author, narrator, duration, ratings, review counts, series info, cover images, etc.
• 💾 Saves structured JSON locally using hashed filenames
• 📊 Computes and displays summary statistics (e.g., average audiobook length per category)
• 🧼 Avoids repeated downloads by caching results in the data/ folder

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📁 Project Structure

audible-data-is-beautiful/
├── audible-crawler.py     # Main script for scraping & saving data
├── cache/                 # Contains saved HTML (e.g., genres.html)
├── data/                  # Stores cached and processed JSON files
│   └── cats.json          # List of categories and subcategories
├── master.json            # Combined output of all categories
└── README.md              # Project documentation

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⚙️ How It Works

1. Read categories from cache/genres.html, saved from Audible's "Browse" or "All Categories" page.

2. Parse and save all categories and subcategories into data/cats.json.

3. For each category:

   • Open the category page on Audible.
   • Extract the top 20 bestsellers from the "Best Sellers" carousel.
   • For each book, extract metadata and convert to structured format.
   • Save the data locally in a JSON file (data/<urlhash>.json).

4. Combine all category data into master.json.

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x

• Required Python libraries:

  pip install requests beautifulsoup4 lxml tabulate

Setup

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/iaseth/audible-data-is-beautiful.git
   cd audible-data-is-beautiful

2. Save the Audible categories page to cache/genres.html:

   • Open Audible Browse Genres
   • Save the page as genres.html and move it to the cache/ directory

3. Run the crawler:

   python audible-crawler.py

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🧠 What Metadata is Extracted?

• title
• series
• author
• narrated_by
• length (in hours and minutes)
• minutes (numeric value of length)
• ratings: overall, performance, story
• review_counts: total reviews per rating category
• description
• cover_image (URL)
• asin (unique Audible ID)
• url (link to the book on Audible)

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📊 Sample Output

The script prints a table like this showing average audiobook length:

+----+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------+-------+
|    | Category                                        |   Average |   Max |   Min |
+====+=================================================+===========+=======+=======+
|  1 | Relationships, Parenting & Personal Development |       466 |   883 |   151 |
|  2 | Home & Garden                                   |       471 |  1102 |    79 |
|  3 | Business & Careers                              |       480 |   907 |   222 |
|  4 | Health & Wellness                               |       506 |  1640 |   119 |
|  5 | Comedy & Humor                                  |       530 |  1087 |   109 |
|  6 | Sports & Outdoors                               |       539 |  1846 |    99 |
|  7 | Children's Audiobooks                           |       580 |  3863 |     8 |
|  8 | Biographies & Memoirs                           |       585 |  2217 |   227 |
|  9 | Arts & Entertainment                            |       591 |  1216 |   229 |
| 10 | Money & Finance                                 |       614 |  1686 |   137 |
| 11 | Education & Learning                            |       662 |  3111 |   113 |
| 12 | LGBTQ+                                          |       663 |  1359 |   136 |
| 13 | Computers & Technology                          |       664 |  1492 |   187 |
| 14 | Travel & Tourism                                |       708 |  3111 |   100 |
| 15 | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense                    |       712 |  1459 |   440 |
| 16 | Politics & Social Sciences                      |       713 |  2048 |   138 |
| 17 | Erotica                                         |       728 |  1413 |   227 |
| 18 | Science & Engineering                           |       746 |  1640 |   221 |
| 19 | Religion & Spirituality                         |       832 |  5881 |   138 |
| 20 | Literature & Fiction                            |       949 |  1927 |   240 |
| 21 | Romance                                         |      1034 |  2221 |   108 |
| 22 | History                                         |      1093 |  3431 |   227 |
| 23 | Science Fiction & Fantasy                       |      1135 |  2025 |   371 |
| 24 | Teen & Young Adult                              |      1143 |  4157 |   287 |
+----+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+-------+-------+

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📂 Output Files

• data/cats.json — categories and subcategories
• data/<md5>.json — bestsellers per category
• master.json — full aggregated data from all categories

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📄 License

MIT License. See LICENSE file.

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🙋‍♀️ Author

@iaseth — built for data visualization and insight into the Audible catalog.