Project Gutenberg Books Scraper — Titles, Authors & Downloads

Search and export Project Gutenberg's public-domain book catalog as clean, structured JSON, CSV or Excel: title, authors (with birth/death years), subjects, bookshelves, languages, download count and ready-to-use download links for plain-text and EPUB. Search by keyword, filter by topic, language and author era, and pull one tidy record per book — thousands of free classics in a single run.

What does Project Gutenberg Books Scraper do?

This Project Gutenberg scraper turns the world's largest library of free, public-domain ebooks into a structured dataset. Give it a search query (like sherlock holmes), or browse the whole catalog and narrow it down by topic, language and author era, then choose how the results are ordered — most popular first, or by catalog ID. For every matching book you get the headline metadata plus direct download links, so you can build reading lists, feed text-analysis pipelines, or archive classics in bulk.

What data can you scrape from Project Gutenberg?

Data point	Description
id	Project Gutenberg book ID.
title	Book title.
authors	Author list — each with name, birthYear and deathYear.
translators	Translators, when credited (same shape as authors).
subjects	Library-of-Congress style subject headings.
bookshelves	Curated Project Gutenberg bookshelf categories.
languages	Two-letter language codes the book is available in.
copyright	Whether the book is under copyright (usually false).
mediaType	Media type (e.g. Text).
downloadCount	How many times the book has been downloaded.
formats	Map of MIME type → download URL (HTML, EPUB, Kindle, plain-text and more).
textUrl	Direct plain-text download link, when available.
epubUrl	Direct EPUB download link, when available.
url	Project Gutenberg reading page for the book.

Use cases

• Reading & research datasets — assemble a themed corpus of classics for analysis or search.
• Text mining & NLP — feed full-text book links into notebooks, models or RAG apps.
• Digital libraries — build or enrich a catalog with titles, authors, subjects and covers.
• Bulk downloads — grab plain-text and EPUB links for offline reading collections.
• Discovery — surface the most popular public-domain books by topic, language or author era.

How to scrape Project Gutenberg data

1. Add Project Gutenberg Books Scraper to your Apify account and open its input.
2. Enter a search query (e.g. sherlock holmes), or leave it empty to browse everything.
3. Optionally set a topic (e.g. children), one or more languages (e.g. ["en"]), and an author era with authorYearStart / authorYearEnd.
4. Choose the sort order and a maxItems cap (or 0 for every match).
5. Click Run, then export the results as JSON, CSV or Excel — or fetch them through the Apify API.

Input

{
  "search": "sherlock holmes",
  "topic": "",
  "languages": ["en"],
  "sort": "popular",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Description
search	Keywords matched against titles and author names.
topic	Single subject/bookshelf keyword filter (e.g. children, history).
languages	Keep only books in these two-letter language codes.
authorYearStart	Keep books with an author alive during/after this year.
authorYearEnd	Keep books with an author alive during/before this year.
sort	popular, ascending or descending.
maxItems	Maximum books to collect (0 = no limit).

What you get

One flat JSON record per book, ready to export to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML:

{
  "id": 1661,
  "title": "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes",
  "authors": [
    { "name": "Doyle, Arthur Conan", "birthYear": 1859, "deathYear": 1930 }
  ],
  "translators": [],
  "subjects": [
    "Detective and mystery stories, English",
    "Private investigators -- England -- Fiction"
  ],
  "bookshelves": ["Category: Crime, Thrillers and Mystery"],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "copyright": false,
  "mediaType": "Text",
  "downloadCount": 96543,
  "formats": {
    "text/plain; charset=us-ascii": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.txt.utf-8",
    "application/epub+zip": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.epub3.images"
  },
  "textUrl": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.txt.utf-8",
  "epubUrl": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.epub3.images",
  "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661"
}

Related Actors

Building a broader books or research dataset? Pair this with:

• OpenLibrary Book Scraper — millions of books by title, author, subject or ISBN.
• arXiv Scraper — research papers with metadata and abstracts.
• Wikipedia Scraper — articles and structured page data.
• Website Content Crawler — crawl any site into clean text for LLM/RAG.

FAQ

What is Project Gutenberg? Project Gutenberg is a volunteer library of over 70,000 free ebooks, mostly older works whose copyright has expired. This Actor makes that catalog searchable and exportable as structured data.

Can I download the actual book text? Yes. Each record includes a formats map plus textUrl and epubUrl shortcuts pointing to the plain-text and EPUB downloads hosted by Project Gutenberg.

How do the filters work together? All filters combine — search, topic, languages and the author-era range are applied together, so you can, for example, find popular English children's books by authors alive in the 1800s.

How many books can I scrape per run? There's no fixed cap. maxItems limits how many books are collected (0 = every match). Larger runs simply take longer.

Is scraping Project Gutenberg data legal? The Actor collects only publicly available catalog data for public-domain works. You are responsible for using it in line with Project Gutenberg's terms and applicable laws.

What's the output format? A structured dataset with one item per book. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel from the Apify Console or API.

Can I use this with n8n, Make or Zapier? Yes. Run it from n8n via the Apify node, or connect it to Make, Zapier, Slack, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients, MCP and webhooks.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Returns only public, public-domain catalog data; you are responsible for compliance with Project Gutenberg's terms. Not affiliated with Project Gutenberg.