Goodreads Scraper — Books, Ratings & Reviews

Get Goodreads book data and reader reviews as clean JSON, CSV or Excel. Paste Goodreads links, book ids, ISBNs or just "title author", or search by title, author or series. For every book you get ratings with the full 1–5 star distribution, review counts per language, description, cover, ISBN/ASIN, pages, publisher, publication dates, genres, series, awards, characters and author details. Add written reviews with text, rating, dates, likes, shelves and reviewer, filtered by stars, language or words mentioned, newest or most popular first, thousands per book.

Built for publishers and book marketers, authors, BookTok and book-club creators, book apps and recommendation engines, and researchers studying reading and reviews. Goodreads closed its public API in 2020; this gives the same data back.

What you get

Book rows (type: "book")

Field	Description
bookId, url, title, titleComplete, originalTitle	Goodreads id and link, title (with series), original title
author, authorId, authorUrl, contributors	Author and all contributors with roles (translator, narrator…)
averageRating, ratingsCount, reviewsCount	e.g. 4.51 from 1,915,068 ratings, 263,601 written reviews
ratingsDistribution	Ratings per star: {"1": 8831, "2": 28265, "3": 139971, "4": 540708, "5": 1197293}
reviewsByLanguage	Written reviews per language: {"en": 235179, "es": 9410, …}
description, imageUrl	Blurb and cover image
genres, series	Top genres/shelves, series name and position
isbn, isbn13, asin, format, pages, publisher, language, publishedAt, firstPublishedAt	Edition details and first publication
awards, characters, places	Awards (winner/nominee, category, year), characters and settings
quotesCount, questionsCount	Community quotes and reader questions
authorBio, authorImageUrl, authorFollowers, authorWorksCount	Author profile

Review rows (type: "review")

Field	Description
bookId, bookTitle	The book reviewed
rating, text, textHtml	Stars (1–5) and review text (plain and HTML)
createdAt, updatedAt	UTC timestamps
likes, comments, spoiler	Engagement and spoiler flag
shelves, readingStatus	The reviewer's shelves/tags for the book (e.g. "favorites", "audiobook") and read status
reviewerId, reviewerName, reviewerUrl, reviewerFollowers, reviewerReviewsCount, reviewerIsAuthor	Reviewer profile
url	Review link

Use cases

• Publishers and marketers: track ratings and new reviews of your list and of competing titles; mine 1–2 star reviews for objections and 5-star reviews for quotes.
• Authors and agents: comparable-title research: rating distributions, review volume, genres and awards.
• Book apps and recommendation engines: rich metadata plus review text for embeddings and sentiment.
• Researchers: reading trends, review language and sentiment over time.

Input

Field	Description
books	Goodreads URLs, book ids, ISBNs or "title author", one per line
searchQueries, resultsPerQuery	Search by title, author or series and take the top N books
includeReviews, maxReviewsPerBook	Reviews on/off and how many per book
reviewSort	Popular (default), newest first or oldest first
reviewStars	Only these star ratings, e.g. ["1","2"] for negative reviews
reviewLanguage, reviewSearch	Review language (en, es, de…) and words the review must mention
maxItems	Maximum rows in total

Example: the 500 newest 1–2 star reviews of two books

{
  "books": ["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401-project-hail-mary", "9781649374042"],
  "reviewStars": ["1", "2"],
  "reviewSort": "NEWEST",
  "maxReviewsPerBook": 250
}

Example: book data only for a list of ISBNs

{ "books": ["9780593135204", "9781649374042", "9780439023481"], "includeReviews": false }

Scheduling and integrations

Schedule a daily run with reviewSort: "NEWEST" to collect new reviews of your titles, and send them to Google Sheets, Slack or your database with Apify integrations, webhooks or the API (/v2/datasets/{id}/items?format=json|csv|xlsx).

Use it from AI assistants

The actor works as a tool in AI agents through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com): "what do readers dislike about Fourth Wing?" can run it with 1–2 star reviews and summarise them.

FAQ

How many reviews can I get? As many as the book has; popular books have hundreds of thousands. Use maxReviewsPerBook to set the limit. In tests 3,000 reviews of one book took under a minute.

Can I search by ISBN? Yes, ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 both work, as do Goodreads URLs, ids and "title author".

Are ratings without text included? No, review rows are written reviews; the book row has the total ratings count and the star distribution.

Is this legal? The actor reads public Goodreads data. You are responsible for how you use it and for respecting reviewers' privacy and Goodreads' terms.

Something wrong or missing? Open an issue on the actor page. Issues are read and answered.