Books & ISBN Scraper: Open Library

Search millions of books by title, author or subject, or look up an exact edition by ISBN.

Built on Open Library, the Internet Archive's open bibliographic database. Official free API, no key, and the data is openly licensed rather than scraped off a retailer's page.

Two lookup paths

Search: searchQueries: ["dune"], author: "Frank Herbert", subject: "science fiction" Answers "what books exist about X / by Y". Returns works with edition counts, ratings and cover art. author and subject work on their own, leave the query empty to pull an author's whole catalogue.

ISBN: isbns: ["978-0-441-01359-3"] Answers "what exactly is this barcode". Returns the specific edition: page count, publisher, publish date, cover, and cross-IDs (ISBN-10/13, Goodreads, Open Library). Hyphens and spaces are fine.

What you get

Field	Example
title, subtitle, authors	Dune, ["Frank Herbert"]
firstPublishYear, publishDate	1965
publishers, numberOfPages	["Ace Books"], 528
isbn, isbn10, isbn13, isbns
editionCount	77
ratingsAverage, ratingsCount, wantToReadCount	4.2, 1841
subjects, languages
hasFullText, ebookAccess	true, a readable scan exists
coverUrl	large cover image
openLibraryKey, goodreadsId, url
excerpt	on ISBN lookups, when published

Filters

• yearFrom / yearTo, first publication window
• minRating, 1-5; books with no ratings are dropped
• readableOnly: only books with a full-text scan in the Internet Archive. The difference between "this book exists" and "you can actually read it."

Filtered-out books are not charged.

Who this is for

• Booksellers & resellers: bulk ISBN enrichment with covers, page counts and publishers
• Libraries & catalogues: clean, openly-licensed metadata you may redistribute
• Reading apps & recommenders: subject and rating data across millions of works
• Researchers: publication history by author, subject or period
• AI / dataset builders: structured bibliographic data with no licensing trap

ISBN lookup and book search, on Open Library

Backed by Open Library, the Internet Archive's open bibliographic database. No key, no quota page, no per-call licence.

You want	Input
A specific edition by its barcode	isbns, ISBN-10 or ISBN-13
Books matching a title or keyword	searchQueries
Everything by one author	author
A whole subject or genre	subject

Per book: title, subtitle, authors, publishers, publication year, page count, subjects, ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, cover image URLs, the Open Library key and work ID, ratings where the community has left them, and whether a full-text scan exists.

readableOnly is the filter worth knowing about. Turn it on and you get only books with a scan you can actually read through the Internet Archive, rather than catalogue records for editions that exist somewhere on a shelf. For building a reading list or a corpus, that is the difference between a usable result and a bibliography.

Filters: yearFrom / yearTo for a publication window, minRating, and maxResultsPerQuery.

Licensing. Open Library data is published under the Open Database License, so it is free to use and redistribute with attribution. That is a real difference from retailer catalogue data, which is not.

Notes

• ISBN-13s must start with 978 or 979; anything else is rejected as invalid rather than silently returning nothing.
• Ratings come from Open Library's own community and are sparser than a retailer's. minRating therefore removes a lot of otherwise valid books, use it deliberately.
• An unknown ISBN returns an error row explaining that Open Library holds no record, rather than an empty result.
• Set a max charge per run in the run options for a hard spend ceiling. The Actor honors it and stops cleanly.

Pricing

Pay per result. One row = one book or edition. Failed lookups come back as error rows and are not charged, and neither is anything your filters removed.