About & sources

Every fact is linked to its source. We never show store prices, and we don’t scrape stores.

What we use

• Open Library: catalogue metadata, narrator credits (contributor field), ratings average and count, “want to read” count and edition count. Open Library data is public domain (CC0). Per its API guidelines we make human-triggered requests only, cache results (seven narrators are pulled once at build time, not per visitor), and do not bulk-harvest.
• Wikipedia: bios and award facts, CC BY-SA 4.0, cited on each page.

How titles are ranked

1. Awards first. A title with a documented award (Audie, AudioFile Earphones, Listen-Up) goes to the top, with the award and its Wikipedia source shown. Flags are curated by hand from Wikipedia pages already cited on the narrator’s page, only for our seven featured narrators. Live search results have no award flags.
2. Then rated titles by a weighted average. Score = (v ÷ (v + 5)) × R + (5 ÷ (v + 5)) × C, where R is the Open Library average rating of the work, v its number of ratings, and C the vote-weighted average rating across that narrator’s own results. This keeps a single 5-star vote from beating a title with dozens of ratings.
3. Then unrated titles by Open Library “want to read” count, then edition count, then title A to Z.

Each row shows the raw numbers (rating, rating count, want-to-read count, editions) so you can judge for yourself. We invent nothing: no number appears unless Open Library or the cited source provides it.

Limits. Open Library ratings and counts are for the work across all editions, not this narrator’s recording, and the numbers are small because it is a modest community. Narrator credits are crowd-sourced and incomplete, so some narrators have a short list or none. This is a transparent popularity-and-recognition ordering, not a measure of narration quality.

What we could not use, and why

• Goodreads: no new API keys since December 2020; its Terms of Use bar data mining, scraping and commercial reuse of listings and reviews; the API terms bar harvesting or indexing its data without written consent.
• Audible (and Amazon): its Conditions of Use prohibit robots and data extraction of content, prices and product lists, and give only a personal, non-commercial licence. No public ratings API. We link to search pages only.
• Libro.fm: no public API for catalogue or ratings that we could find, so we don’t take its data. Search links only.
• Hardcover: its API rules allow commercial and public sites to use facts about books, but not users’ ratings, reviews or lists, except aggregate statistics credited as “Hardcover data”. The API also needs an account token and has its own rate limits, so we did not integrate it in this version. It is a candidate for later (aggregate rating and reader counts, credited), pending a closer read of the terms.
• Audie Awards (Audio Publishers Association) and AudioFile Earphones: the official lists are web pages with no open licence or API, so we don’t copy them. We use only award facts stated on Wikipedia pages (CC BY-SA), which is why award flags exist for only a handful of titles.

Store links are plain search links. Narrator credits from Open Library are crowd-sourced and may be incomplete or wrong.