Booksonix, the book management software Orca uses to manage their publications and workflow released an API (Application Programming Interface) a few weeks ago — so I started playing with it to see if I could automate some of my work.

After much playing with flask, jinja and json files I made a thing of beauty. Just plug in the print ISBN and it delivers me the cover for download and all the metadata, formatted and everything so I can just copy and paste it into the epub’s .opf file. That’s what an API does, let you get info out of a system without having to go through the regular interface so you can manipulate it the way you want. All the best websites have one: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc.