BookScout 🔍📚

BookScout is a full‑stack, AI‑powered book recommendation web app that uses semantic similarity, genre filtering, and automated metadata enrichment to suggest books you’ll love. Built with Flask, Pandas, BeautifulSoup, Hugging Face Transformers, and Chart.js, it features a dark‑mode UI and a scalable CSV‑backed cache.

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🚀 Features

• Search & Recommend

  • Query by book title
  • TF‑IDF + cosine similarity on descriptions + genres
  • Optional genre filter checkboxes

• Metadata Enrichment

  • Google Books API for base metadata
  • Wikipedia fallback for plot summaries & categories
  • Zero‑shot genre classification (facebook/bart‑large‑mnli)

• Bulk Addition

  • Scrape Goodreads lists for new titles
  • Clean & dedupe titles (removes series info)
  • Add in bulk via bulk_add.py with auto‑preprocessing

• Data Utilities (/scripts)

  • scrape_goodreads.py → Fetch new titles from Goodreads
  • strip_malformed_rows.py → Clean up broken CSV rows
  • clean_categories.py → Sanitize category fields
  • genre_counter.py → Count & normalize genres (CSV + <option> HTML)
  • structure_maker.py → Print project folder tree

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⚙️ Setup & Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/anand25116/bookscout.git
   cd bookscout

2. Create & activate virtual environment

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate   # macOS/Linux
   venv\Scripts\activate      # Windows

3. Install dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Configure environment

   • Copy .env.example to .env
   • Add your GOOGLE_BOOKS_API_KEY (optional)

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🏃‍♂️ Running the App

export FLASK_APP=app.py
export FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

• Open http://localhost:5000
• Enter a book title and optional genre filters → See recommendations!

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🛠️ Bulk-Add Workflow

1. Generate new titles (optional)

   python scripts/scrape_goodreads.py

2. Add to cache & preprocess

   python bulk_add.py

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📊 Data Analysis

• Clean categories:

  python scripts/clean_categories.py

• Count genres & generate options:

  python scripts/genre_counter.py

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📦 Packaging & Deployment

• Dockerize with a Dockerfile (not included)
• Deploy to Heroku / AWS / GCP with Procfile & environment variables

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🔗 Links & Resources

• Google Books API
• Hugging Face Transformers
• Chart.js
• Flask

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