Goodreads Book Metadata Scraper

Extract structured book metadata from Goodreads URLs including title, author, ratings, ISBN, page count, cover image, and awards. This Actor parses Schema.org JSON-LD data embedded in Goodreads book pages to deliver clean, structured output without requiring JavaScript rendering.

Use Cases

• Book catalog enrichment — Build or update a book database with rich metadata from Goodreads
• Reading list analysis — Extract ratings and review counts for research or recommendation engines
• Price comparison preparation — Gather ISBN, format, and page data for inventory matching
• Academic research — Collect bibliographic data including language and awards for literature studies

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
startUrls	Array	Yes	Goodreads book URLs to extract metadata from
maxItems	Number	No	Maximum books to extract (default: 50)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy configuration for scraping

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset with the following fields:

{
  "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1",
  "title": "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince",
  "authors": ["J.K. Rowling"],
  "rating": 4.58,
  "ratingCount": 3734294,
  "reviewCount": 73449,
  "imageUrl": "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1587697303i/1.jpg",
  "isbn": "9780439785969",
  "pages": 652,
  "language": "English",
  "bookFormat": "Paperback",
  "awards": "Locus Award Best Young Adult Novel (2006)",
  "description": "The war against Voldemort is not going well..."
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per book extracted.

Limitations

• Requires direct Goodreads book URLs (search/discovery is not supported)
• Goodreads may rate-limit requests; proxy usage is recommended for large batches
• Some book pages may have incomplete JSON-LD metadata
• Awards and description fields may be empty for newer or less popular books

FAQ

Q: Can I use this to search for books on Goodreads? A: No. This Actor requires direct Goodreads book URLs. Use Goodreads search to find URLs, then provide them as input.

Q: Do I need a proxy? A: Proxy is recommended for scraping more than 10 books at once to avoid rate limiting.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release