Open Library Book Scraper — Search, Works & ISBN | from $0.50/1K

Built for reading-app developers, academic researchers, and LLM dataset builders who need structured book metadata by ISBN, keyword, or Open Library work ID. Official public API — no proxy, no auth, zero COGS.

Scrape book data from Open Library (openlibrary.org) via the official public API. No proxy. No auth. No browser. Pay per result.

Features

• Keyword search — full-text across title, author, subject, or all fields
• Work lookup — direct fetch by Open Library work ID with description + subjects
• ISBN lookup — resolve ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 to edition data + parent work link
• Ratings — optional star ratings (average + count) via the ratings API
• Cover images — cover URLs in S / M / L size
• parse_confidence — machine-readable quality score in every record
• Flat schema — 19 fields, ready for CSV/JSON/BigQuery

Why this beats the alternatives

Actor	Price	API	Ratings	parse_confidence	Proxy needed
This actor	$0.50/1k	Official OL API	✓	✓	No
Most OL scrapers	$3–10/1k	HTML scraping	—	No	Required
Generic book scrapers	$5+/1k	DOM	—	No	Required

Our edge: official Open Library JSON API (zero-auth, extremely stable), ratings support, parse_confidence field for drift detection, multi-mode batch processing.

Input modes

Mode	How to use	Returns
searchQueries	List of keyword queries	Work records matching query
workIds	List of OL work IDs (e.g. OL893415W)	Full work data + optional ratings
isbns	List of ISBN-10 or ISBN-13	Edition data + parent work link

Output schema

Field	Type	Description
work_key	string	Open Library work ID (e.g. /works/OL893415W)
title	string	Book title
authors	array	Author names (search) or author OL IDs (work/isbn)
first_publish_year	integer	Year of first publication
isbn_list	array	ISBNs (up to 20)
subjects	array	Subject / genre tags (up to 30)
edition_count	integer	Number of editions
language	array	Language codes (e.g. ["eng", "spa"])
cover_url	string	Cover image URL (S/M/L size)
ratings_avg	number	Star rating average (0–5)
ratings_count	integer	Number of ratings
number_of_pages	integer	Page count (median for search, edition for ISBN)
description	string	Work synopsis (work mode) or publisher info (isbn mode)
url	string	Canonical Open Library URL
source	string	search | work | isbn
query	string	Input that produced this record
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC run timestamp
parse_confidence	number	Quality score 0–1 (1.0 = perfect)
warnings	array	Machine-readable quality warnings

Pricing

Pay-per-result: from $0.50 per 1,000 books (book-item event). No subscription. Pay only for what you extract.

Volume	Cost
100 books	~$0.05
1,000 books	~$0.50
10,000 books	~$5.00

Open Library is a public archive — no compute-heavy rendering, minimal latency. A typical run of 1,000 search results costs approximately $0.002 in compute.

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FAQ

Do I need a proxy or API key? No. Open Library is a fully public API hosted by the Internet Archive — no authentication or proxy required.

What output formats are available? JSON, CSV, and Excel — downloadable from the Apify dataset UI or via the REST API.

Can I schedule this to run automatically? Yes. Use Apify's scheduler to refresh your book catalog on a cron schedule, and push updates via webhook.

What if a barcode or work ID returns no result? The actor logs a warning and skips the record — it does not crash. Sparse or community-contributed entries (rare/old books) may have some fields null; parse_confidence flags these automatically.

Notes

• authors field: search mode returns human-readable names. Work/ISBN mode returns Open Library author IDs (e.g. /authors/OL79034A) — a subsequent work lookup per author would be needed for names.
• fetchRatings=true adds one extra HTTP request per book — use only when ratings data is essential.
• Open Library has no official rate limit for read access. The actor makes sequential requests to stay well within reasonable limits.
• Data is community-contributed and may be incomplete for rare/old books.

Example use cases

• Academic research — find all editions of a work by ISBN or subject
• Library catalog augmentation — enrich ISBN lists with metadata
• Reading apps — build book recommendation datasets
• Data journalism — analyze publishing trends by year, language, subject

Not affiliated with the Internet Archive or openlibrary.org.

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Use with AI agents (MCP)

This actor is available as an MCP tool for Claude, GPT-4, and other AI agents that support the Model Context Protocol:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=bovi/openlibrary-scraper

Pass an ISBN or keyword and get back structured book records — ideal for reading-app AI features and bibliographic RAG pipelines.

Integrations

Built for reading-app developers and LLM dataset builders resolving ISBNs and keywords to structured book metadata — the JSON/dataset output drops into the tools you already run, no glue code:

• n8n / Make / Zapier — trigger a run or pipe every new dataset item into 500+ apps (Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, your database) with no code: n8n, Make, Zapier.
• Webhooks — fire your own endpoint the moment a run finishes, to push results straight into your pipeline (docs).
• MCP server — expose this actor as a tool to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client so an AI agent can pull this data mid-conversation (guide).
• API & SDKs — fetch the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel through the Apify REST API or the Python / JS SDKs.

See all Apify integrations.