Book Scraper — Titles, Authors & ISBNs (Open Library)

Scrape book data — titles, authors, ISBNs, subjects, covers, ratings, and editions — into one unified dataset using the free, public Open Library API. No login, no proxies, no browser. Just clean, structured book metadata.

Search by title/author/keyword, or look up specific books by ISBN or Open Library work ID.

What you get

Every book is returned as one row (recordType: "book"), from whichever source it came:

Field	Description
bookId	work ID or ISBN, whichever identifies the record
workId	Open Library work ID (e.g. OL27482W)
isbn	an ISBN for the book (when available)
title	book title
authors	list of author names
firstPublishYear	earliest publication year
publishDate	edition publish date (from ISBN/work lookup)
publishers	publisher names
editionCount	number of known editions
pages	page count (median across editions, or the edition's own)
rating / ratingCount	average Open Library rating and vote count
languages	language codes
subjects	subjects / genres
description	synopsis (from ISBN/work lookup)
coverUrl	cover image
url	Open Library page
origin	which lookup produced the row: search / isbn / work

Input

{
  "search": ["the hobbit"],
  "isbns": ["9780547928227"],
  "workIds": ["OL27482W"],
  "language": "eng",
  "limit": 20
}

• search — titles, authors, or keywords to search on Open Library.
• isbns — ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 (hyphens/spaces are ignored).
• workIds — Open Library work IDs (the OL...W in the work URL).
• language — optional 3-letter code to filter search results (e.g. eng).
• limit — max books per search query (1–100).

Provide at least one of search, isbns, or workIds. Books found across multiple sources are de-duplicated.

Sample output

One dataset row (a book from a search query):

{
  "recordType": "book",
  "origin": "search",
  "bookId": "OL893414W",
  "workId": "OL893414W",
  "isbn": "9780441007493",
  "title": "Dune",
  "authors": ["Frank Herbert"],
  "firstPublishYear": 1965,
  "editionCount": 161,
  "pages": 606,
  "rating": 4.3031673,
  "ratingCount": 442,
  "languages": ["eng", "fre", "spa", "rus", "pol"],
  "subjects": ["Dune (Imaginary place)", "Fiction", "Science fiction"],
  "coverUrl": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/11481354-L.jpg",
  "url": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL893414W"
}

Why it's reliable & cheap

Every request hits the public Open Library JSON API — no headless browser, no anti-bot walls, no API key. Transient errors (rate limits, 5xx, network blips) are retried automatically, and an unreachable or unknown source is reported and skipped — one bad source never fails the whole run.

Use cases

• Book catalogs & library apps — build a dataset of titles, authors, and covers
• Metadata enrichment — resolve an ISBN to full book details
• Research & analytics — subjects, publication years, edition counts, ratings
• Recommendation pipelines — subject and author overlap across a reading list

Data courtesy of Open Library (a project of the Internet Archive).

FAQ

Do I need an API key or login? No. It uses the free, public Open Library API — no key, no account, no proxy.

Is it free to try? Yes — click Try for free and run the prefilled search (the hobbit) in seconds.

Does an ISBN lookup return the author? Yes — the Actor follows the edition to its work and resolves author names for you.

What's an Open Library work ID? The OL…W in the work URL (openlibrary.org/works/OL27482W → OL27482W).

Is this allowed? Open Library (a project of the Internet Archive) provides this public API for developers; attribution is included in the output docs.

Pricing

Pay per result — $5 per 1,000 books. Runs that return nothing cost nothing. No monthly fee, no proxy costs.