Kyobo Book Bestseller Scraper — Korean Bookstore Charts 📕

Scrape the bestseller chart from Kyobo Book (교보문고) — Korea's #1 bookstore chain — as clean, structured JSON. Get rank, title, author, publisher, price (KRW), ISBN, genre, and cover image for every book on the chart in one run.

The perfect feed for publishing intelligence, translation-rights scouting, and Korean book-market research. Pair it with yes24-bestseller-scraper to cover Korea's two largest bookstores in one pipeline.

Try it free. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly platform credit — at $2.00 / 1,000 results that's roughly 2,500 book records from this actor, no credit card required. Set your input, click Start, and export JSON/CSV/Excel.

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What it does

This actor reads the bestseller list straight from Kyobo Book's own public JSON API (the same endpoint the website calls as you browse the chart), so results are fast and complete — no fragile full-page scraping, no headless browser. You can scrape:

• The overall chart (종합 베스트셀러, all genres), or
• A specific genre (e.g. Fiction, Humanities, Business, Science).

Charts are available for three periods:

• Weekly (주간) — the default,
• Monthly (월간),
• Annual (연간).

Why Kyobo Book? Kyobo Book (교보문고) is Korea's largest and most influential bookstore chain, and its bestseller chart is a primary barometer of what Korea is reading. Publishers, literary agents, and rights scouts watch it to spot breakout titles, track category trends, and time translation-rights deals. This actor turns that chart into a structured dataset you can filter, join on ISBN, and pipe into your own tools.

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Input

Field	Type	Description
period	string	Chart period: weekly (주간), monthly (월간), or annual (연간). Default weekly.
category	string	Genre filter. all returns the overall chart (default). Presets include fiction, essay, poetry, humanities, politics-society, business, science, health, children, parenting, foreign-language, korean-fiction, foreign-fiction (Korean genre names and raw genre codes A–N are also accepted).
maxItems	integer	Max books to collect. Default 100. The chart ranks up to 200 books per period, so 200 is the effective maximum.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings (see below). Defaults to a direct connection.

Input example

{
  "period": "weekly",
  "category": "all",
  "maxItems": 100
}

{
  "period": "monthly",
  "category": "business",
  "maxItems": 50
}

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Output

Each book on the chart is one dataset record. price_krw is the list price in Korean won; sale_price_krw is Kyobo's discounted price. isbn is the ISBN-13, ideal for joining against other catalogues and rights databases. category is the book's own genre as Kyobo classifies it.

{
  "source": "kyobo",
  "rank": 1,
  "item_id": "S000000620195",
  "title": "싯다르타",
  "author": "헤르만 헤세",
  "publisher": "민음사",
  "price_krw": 8000,
  "sale_price_krw": 7200,
  "isbn": "9788937460586",
  "category": "소설",
  "url": "https://product.kyobobook.co.kr/detail/S000000620195",
  "image_url": "https://contents.kyobobook.co.kr/sih/fit-in/458x0/pdt/S000000620195.jpg",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-14T15:04:34+09:00"
}

A full 40-item sample from a real run is in samples/sample-output.json.

Field	Meaning
source	Always "kyobo".
rank	1-based bestseller rank as printed by Kyobo (ties can skip numbers).
item_id	Kyobo product ID (saleCmdtid), used in the detail URL.
title	Book title.
author	Author / creator name (public commercial attribution).
publisher	Publisher name.
price_krw	List price in KRW.
sale_price_krw	Kyobo's discounted price in KRW (equals price_krw when there is no discount).
isbn	ISBN-13 (cmdtCode).
category	The book's genre as Kyobo classifies it (소설, 인문, 경제/경영 …).
url	Product detail page URL.
image_url	Cover image URL (Kyobo's standard cover CDN path for the product).
scraped_at	ISO-8601 timestamp (KST, UTC+9).

The core fields — rank, title, author, publisher, price_krw, sale_price_krw, isbn, category, url, image_url — were populated on 40/40 records in the live test. The critical fields rank, title, author, price_krw are always present.

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Use cases

• Publishing & translation-rights scouting — watch what Korea is buying, spot breakout titles early, and pull ISBNs to check foreign-rights availability. Filter by genre (e.g. fiction, humanities) to track the categories you acquire in.
• Bestseller tracking — schedule the actor for daily/weekly snapshots and build a time series of rank movements, new entries, and price changes across the weekly, monthly, and annual charts.
• Retail & book-market research — measure genre mix, price bands, and publisher share across the chart; benchmark Kyobo against other Korean retailers.
• AI agents & datasets — feed structured, ISBN-keyed bestseller data into pricing models, dashboards, or LLM agents.

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❓ FAQ

Is it legal to scrape this data? This actor collects only public, non-personal bestseller data — the same chart any visitor sees on store.kyobobook.co.kr without logging in. No personal data is collected (no reviews, reviewer names, or user IDs). You are responsible for how you use the data; see the legality note below.

What does it cost in practice? $2.00 per 1,000 results (launch pricing) + a few cents of platform usage. A full 200-book chart costs about $0.40. Apify's free $5 monthly credit covers ~2,500 results (5 ÷ 2 × 1,000).

Do I need to configure proxies? No — the default settings work out of the box. Kyobo Book serves its bestseller API without a bot wall, so the actor runs fine on a direct connection. For very heavy pulls you can optionally enable Apify Proxy — see the proxy note below.

How fresh is the data? Every run scrapes the live Kyobo chart at run time. Schedule the actor for recurring snapshots (e.g. weekly bestseller tracking).

Which chart is this? The flagship 종합(overall) 베스트셀러 chart — Kyobo's headline bestseller list, combining sales across channels — for the weekly, monthly, and annual periods.

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🤖 Use with AI agents (MCP)

Call this Actor as a tool from Claude or any MCP-compatible AI agent — no glue code. Point your MCP client at Apify's server, scoped to this Actor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=kdatafactory/kyobo-bestseller-scraper",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Your agent can then pull Korean bestseller data on demand — no scraping code in your app. Grab a free token from Apify → Integrations.

🇰🇷 More Korean data actors

This actor is part of a suite of Korean-platform scrapers by the same maintainer:

• yes24-bestseller-scraper — bestseller & K-pop album charts from Yes24, Korea's largest online bookstore. Run it together with this actor for two-store book-market coverage.
• aladin-scraper — new & used book data from Aladin (알라딘), Korea's big used-book marketplace.

Browse all: apify.com/kdatafactory

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Rate limiting & legality

• The actor collects only public, non-authenticated data. It never logs in and never touches private endpoints.
• No personal data is collected — no reviews, reviewer nicknames, or user IDs. Only the book's public catalogue attributes and its public bestseller rank are returned.
• Requests are rate-limited: one page at a time with a ≥ 500 ms delay between requests, to stay gentle on Kyobo's servers.
• You are responsible for using the data in line with Kyobo Book's terms of service and applicable law.

Known limitations (honesty note)

• publisher and category come straight from Kyobo's API and were populated on 40/40 records in the live test. The output schema still allows null defensively, for the occasional non-standard product (e.g. a boxed set) where Kyobo omits a field.
• image_url is Kyobo's standard cover-CDN URL derived from the product ID (the chart API itself does not return a cover path). It resolves for normal books; a brand-new or unusual product could occasionally lack a cover at that path.
• rank follows Kyobo's own numbering — tied books can share or skip a rank number, so a 120-item pull may span ranks 1–122. This mirrors the source chart exactly.
• Titles, author, publisher, and genre are Korean strings — this actor returns them verbatim as Kyobo publishes them (no translation). isbn gives you a language-neutral key for joins.
• Daily charts are not covered. This actor targets the flagship 종합(overall) chart, which Kyobo offers weekly, monthly, and annually. (Kyobo's separate online-only chart offers a daily view; it is a different chart and is out of scope here.)

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