OpenLibrary Book Search

Keyless book metadata over OpenLibrary (40M+ titles) — no API key. Search by title, author, subject or ISBN; filter by language; sort by relevance / most editions / newest / oldest. Per book: authors, subject, publish year, editions, pages, fulltext & lending availability, series, cover, detail URL.

What you get

Every run writes a dataset with one row per record:

{
  "title": "Dune",
  "author": "Frank Herbert",
  "authors": [
    "Frank Herbert"
  ],
  "subject": null,
  "first_publish_year": 1965,
  "editions": 161,
  "page_count": null,
  "description": null,
  "language": [
    "ukr",
    "dut",
    "tur",
    "por",
    "gre"
  ],
  "has_fulltext": true,
  "public_scan": false,
  "ebook_access": "borrowable",
  "lending_available": true,
  "series": [
    "Dune"
  ],
  "cover": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/11481354-M.jpg",
  "url": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL893414W"
}

Input

{
  "title": "dune",
  "author": "frank herbert",
  "isbn": "",
  "language": "",
  "limit": 10,
  "sort_by": "relevance"
}

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Title: the title parameter. Default: "dune".
author	string	Author: the author parameter. Default: "frank herbert".
isbn	string	Isbn: the isbn parameter. Default: "".
language	string	Language: the language parameter. Default: "".
limit	integer	Limit: the limit parameter. Default: 10.
sort_by	string	SortBy: the sortby parameter. Default: "relevance".

Use cases

• Monitor on a schedule — run this Actor on a timer and get a fresh, normalized snapshot every time; diff the datasets to see what changed.
• Feed a dashboard or model — clean, one-JSON-item-per-record output is ready to pipe into a spreadsheet, database, or LLM prompt without any post-processing.
• Research & due diligence — pull a structured set of records for a topic, name, or window without scraping the public source by hand.

Limits & notes

• No API key, no login: it only reads public endpoints/feeds. If the upstream source is degraded, the run still succeeds and returns an honest status item instead of failing.
• Results reflect what the public source returned at run time (top-N windows, newest-first where applicable).
• Pay-per-event via synthetic events: each default-dataset item is billed through apify-default-dataset-item ($0.001 per item), plus apify-actor-start.
• Free to try on the free plan; PPE pricing applies to paid-plan users.

Categories

EDUCATION, OTHER