Pricing

$0.70 / 1,000 per book results

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Open Library Books Scraper - Search & Work Metadata

Try for free

Queries the official openlibrary.org JSON search and works endpoints and returns flat book records with titles, authors, keys, editions, and availability.

Pricing

$0.70 / 1,000 per book results

Rating

5.0

(1)

Developer

Ahmed

Actor stats

Bookmarked

Total users

Monthly active users

2 days ago

Last modified

Open Library Books Scraper

Runs Open Library search and work queries (by title, author, or any search.json URL) and returns flat, per-book records with titles, authors, publication years, edition counts, ebook access status, and Internet Archive lending identifiers. Built for developers, researchers, and librarians who need structured Open Library data without writing their own API client or parsing HTML.

Why this scraper

Reads directly from Open Library's official search.json and works.json endpoints, not scraped HTML, so author keys and Internet Archive identifiers come through reliably instead of being dropped or malformed.
Priced at $0.0007 per result, lower than the closest comparable per-result offering, and cheaper overall than flat per-run pricing once you're pulling more than a handful of books.
No login, no JS rendering, no anti-bot workarounds needed — the target API is public and returns plain JSON, so there's nothing fragile in the middle of the pipeline.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
workKey	string	Open Library work key, e.g. /works/OL45804W
title	string	Book title
subtitle	string	Book subtitle if present
authorNames	string	Comma-separated author names
authorKeys	string	Comma-separated Open Library author keys
firstPublishYear	integer	Year of first publication
editionCount	integer	Number of known editions
ebookAccess	string	Ebook access level: public, borrowable, printdisabled, no_ebook, etc.
hasFulltext	boolean	Whether a full-text scan is available
publicScan	boolean	Whether the scan is publicly readable
coverId	integer	Cover image ID
coverEditionKey	string	Edition key used to build the cover image URL
languages	string	Comma-separated language codes
subjects	string	Comma-separated subjects (from work detail endpoint)
iaIdentifiers	string	Comma-separated Internet Archive identifiers
lendingIdentifier	string	Internet Archive identifier used for lending
description	string	Work description text if available

Input

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=python&limit=20" }
  ],
  "maxItems": 50
}

startUrls accepts any Open Library search.json or works/*.json URL, including author searches like https://openlibrary.org/search.json?author=tolkien&limit=20. maxItems caps the total number of records returned across all start URLs.

Output

{
  "workKey": "/works/OL2784125W",
  "title": "Learning Python",
  "subtitle": "",
  "authorNames": "Mark Lutz,David Ascher",
  "authorKeys": "OL411267A,OL2726848A",
  "firstPublishYear": 1999,
  "editionCount": 23,
  "ebookAccess": "borrowable",
  "hasFulltext": true,
  "publicScan": false,
  "coverId": 1312568,
  "coverEditionKey": "OL9497269M",
  "languages": "ger,eng",
  "subjects": "",
  "iaIdentifiers": "einfuhrunginpyth0000lutz,learningpython00lutz,learningpythonth00lutz",
  "lendingIdentifier": "einfuhrunginpyth0000lutz",
  "description": ""
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.0007 per book record returned. A search returning 200 books costs about $0.14; pulling 1,000 records costs about $0.70.

Use cases

Building a reading-list or library-catalog app that needs author keys and edition counts without maintaining an Open Library API integration.
Academic or bibliometric research tracking edition counts, first-publish years, and language spread across an author's or subject's body of work.
Checking ebook availability and Internet Archive lending identifiers in bulk before linking out to borrowable copies from a book-discovery site.

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