Have you ever wanted to find high-quality children’s literature for your kids on a regular basis but struggled to find a convenient way to do so? Or, as an educator, do you wish you could discover new books for your students every week? Today, I’d like to share a practical n8n automation workflow that can help you easily implement the function of “automatically recommending children’s books + email push”.
What can this workflow do?
In short, this is an automated book recommendation assistant. Its core functions are:
- Triggered regularly (at 11:00 am every Friday) or manually
- Get a random book recommendation on the topic of children’s literature from OpenLibrary, an open online book catalog
- Automatically send the recommendation results to your email
- If there are no books available for the topic, a friendly reminder email will be sent
Detailed Configuration Process
1. Trigger mode setting
The workflow provides two triggering mechanisms to meet different needs:
- Timed automatic trigger : The default setting is 11:00 am every Friday. You can modify the time as needed
- Manual trigger : Click the execute button at any time to get recommendations immediately
2. Theme Settings
With the “Set Subject” node, you can specify the subject of the books you want to obtain. The current default setting is “juvenile_literature”, but you can easily change it to any subject you’re interested in, such as science fiction, history books, etc.
3. Check the number of books
The workflow first calls the OpenLibrary API to check the total number of books under the specified topic:
- If there are books available, continue with the recommendation process
- If no books are available, send a reminder email directly
4. Random Book Selection
To ensure the randomness of the recommendation, the workflow will:
- Generate a random offset based on the total number of books
- Use this offset to call the API to get the basic information of a random book
- Further obtain detailed description information of the book
5. Build and send email content
The system will automatically organize the book information and generate beautiful HTML email content, including:
- Book title (with link)
- Author information (with link)
- Book Details
- OpenLibrary book link
Finally, send it to the specified email address via Gmail.
Applicable Scenarios
This workflow is especially suitable for the following people:
- Parents: Regularly receive recommendations for high-quality children’s literature to enrich parent-child reading time
- Teachers / Educators : Find suitable reading materials for students of different ages
- Librarian : Discover new recommended books to supplement the collection
- Reading enthusiasts : Customize personalized reading recommendations for yourself or your family
How do I extend this workflow?
This workflow is just a starting point, and you can expand it according to your own needs:
- Modify the subject: Simply change the subject value of the “Set Subject” node, for example, change it to “science_fiction” to get science fiction recommendations
- Adjust Frequency: Modify the scheduled trigger node to daily, monthly, or any other frequency you like
- Add multiple topics : Expand the workflow and get book recommendations for multiple topics at the same time
- Add more information : such as book cover, rating, publication information, etc.
- Multi-channel push : Not only through email, but also to platforms such as Telegram
