Open Library Author Scraper

What it does

Scrapes author information from the Open Library database. Searches for authors by name and retrieves biographical details, top works, work counts, and subject areas.

This actor connects to the Open Library public API, fetches structured author data based on your search criteria, and stores the results in a clean, normalized dataset on the Apify platform. It handles pagination automatically so you can collect large volumes of author records without worrying about API limits or offsets. The actor is designed to be robust with built-in error handling, request timeouts, and input validation to ensure reliable data collection every time you run it.

Why use this actor

Manually querying APIs and handling pagination, rate limits, and data normalization is tedious and error-prone. This actor automates the entire process of collecting author data from Open Library. Simply provide an author name or search term, set the maximum number of results you want, and let the actor handle the rest. The data is stored in a structured dataset that you can export as JSON, CSV, or Excel. You can integrate this actor into larger workflows using the Apify API, schedule it for recurring data collection, or trigger it from your own applications via webhooks. Open Library is one of the largest open-access book databases available, making this actor ideal for researchers, librarians, publishers, and anyone interested in bibliographic data analysis.

Input parameters

• searchQuery (string, required): The author name or search term to query Open Library. Default: "Tolkien".
• maxResults (integer, optional): Maximum number of results to return. Default: 100. Range: 1-1000.

All inputs are validated at startup with sensible defaults applied when values are missing. The actor will log warnings for any misconfigured options and continue with safe defaults rather than failing outright.

Output data

Each result in the dataset contains the following fields:

• key: The unique Open Library author key identifier
• name: The full name of the author
• birthDate: The author's date of birth (if available)
• deathDate: The author's date of death (if available)
• topWork: The title of the author's most notable work
• workCount: The total number of works attributed to this author
• topSubjects: Comma-separated list of the author's top five subject areas

All string fields are null-checked to ensure consistent data quality. Missing or undefined values are stored as null rather than empty strings or undefined values.

Example output

{
    "key": "OL29170A",
    "name": "J.R.R. Tolkien",
    "birthDate": "3 January 1892",
    "deathDate": "2 September 1973",
    "topWork": "The Lord of the Rings",
    "workCount": 473,
    "topSubjects": "Accessible book, Fiction, Protected DAISY, Middle Earth (Imaginary place), Fantasy fiction"
}

Pricing

This actor is available on the Apify platform with transparent usage-based pricing. Each run incurs a small startup cost of approximately $0.005 per start, plus roughly $0.01 per result collected. Actual costs depend on the number of results, API response times, and memory allocation. You can control costs by setting the maxResults parameter to limit the number of results collected per run. For high-volume use cases, consider running the actor on a schedule during off-peak hours to optimize platform resource usage.

More scrapers from brave_paradise

Check out these other useful data collection actors by brave_paradise:

• Open Library Search Scraper
• Project Gutenberg Ebook Scraper
• Wikidata Knowledge Scraper

Visit the brave_paradise profile on Apify to explore the full collection of specialized data scrapers and automation tools.