errors with json.loads

[john polo]

Greetings,

I am using IPython 6.1.0 with Python 3.6.2 on a Windows 7 machine. I am 
not a programmer. I am using a book called Python Data Analytics to try 
to learn some of Python. I am at a section for reading and writing JSON 
data. The example JSON file is:


Listing 5-13.  books.json
[{"writer": "Mark Ross",
  "nationality": "USA",
  "books": [
          {"title": "XML Cookbook", "price": 23.56},
          {"title": "Python Fundamentals", "price": 50.70},
          {"title": "The NumPy library", "price": 12.30}
              ]
},
{"writer": "Barbara Bracket",
  "nationality": "UK",
  "books": [
          {"title": "Java Enterprise", "price": 28.60},
          {"title": "HTML5", "price": 31.35},
          {"title": "Python for Dummies", "price": 28.00}
              ]
}]

and the example code for reading the file is:

 >>> file = open('books.json','r')
 >>> text = file.read()
 >>> text = json.loads(text)

When I use those 3 lines, I get the following:

JSONDecodeError                           Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-22-7aafd41f326e> in <module>()
----> 1 text = json.loads(text)

c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\__init__.py in loads(s, encoding, 
cls, object_hook, parse_float, parse_int, parse_constant, 
object_pairs_hook, **kw)
     352             parse_int is None and parse_float is None and
     353             parse_constant is None and object_pairs_hook is 
None and not kw):
--> 354         return _default_decoder.decode(s)
     355     if cls is None:
     356         cls = JSONDecoder

c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\decoder.py in decode(self, s, _w)
     337
     338         """
--> 339         obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
     340         end = _w(s, end).end()
     341         if end != len(s):

c:\users\..\python\python36\lib\json\decoder.py in raw_decode(self, s, idx)
     353         """
     354         try:
--> 355             obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
     356         except StopIteration as err:
     357             raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, 
err.value) from None

JSONDecodeError: Expecting ':' delimiter: line 5 column 50 (char 161)

?json.loads says that the method is for deserializing "s", with "s" 
being a string, bytes, or bytearray.

In [24]: type(text)
Out[24]: str

So "text" seems to be a string. Why does json.loads return an error?


John