Douban Scraper 豆瓣: Movie, Book & Music Reviews, Comments and Search

Scrape Douban (豆瓣), China's largest site for movie, book and music ratings: full-text reviews (影评 / 书评 / 乐评) with stars and author, short comments (短评) with stars and helpful votes, and title search with the Douban score, year, directors, cast and authors. Paste a Douban link or type a title. No login, no cookies, no Chinese phone number.

{
  "subjectUrls": ["https://movie.douban.com/subject/1291546/", "https://book.douban.com/subject/2567698/"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "includeComments": true
}

Input	Rows
Movie, book or music link	About 20 of the most helpful reviews, full text
Book or music link	Up to 200 short comments with stars and votes
Search keyword	Matching titles with score, year, people and cover (books show up best; for a movie, paste its link)
Search keyword + maxSubjectsFromSearch	The titles, then reviews and comments of the top N

Why Use This Scraper?

• Full review text. Reviews come whole, not as a teaser: a median of 3,000 to 5,000 characters, the longest over 30,000.
• Pay per row, low price. $10 per 1,000 reviews and $2 per 1,000 short comments or search results. Empty answers are not charged.
• No account needed. Douban asks visitors for a login and a slider check; this actor needs neither.
• Clean, typed rows. Stars as 1-5 numbers with Douban's own label (力荐, 推荐, 还行, 较差, 很差), votes and reply counts as numbers, dates in ISO format.

Use Cases

• Audience research for films, series, books and albums before a launch or a release in China.
• Sentiment and opinion mining: thousands of rated short comments per book, ready for NLP.
• Competitive and brand monitoring of how Chinese readers and viewers rate a title.
• Training and evaluation data for Chinese-language review models.
• Academic research on Chinese popular culture and reception.

How It Works

1. Links in Douban links are read first: reviews and short comments, as switched on.
2. Each search keyword returns matching titles. With Reviews and comments for the top search results above 0, the top titles of each keyword get their reviews and comments too.
3. Three titles are worked on at once. Reviews take 45-90 seconds per title, comments 15-30 seconds.
4. Every row is charged as it is delivered, and the run stops cleanly at your spending limit.

Input Configuration

Field	Type	Description
subjectUrls	array	Douban movie, book or music links (desktop or m.douban.com). movie:1292052 also works.
includeReviews	boolean	Long-form reviews. Default on.
maxReviewsPerSubject	integer	Default 20. Douban serves about 20 per title.
includeComments	boolean	Short comments. Default on.
maxCommentsPerSubject	integer	Default 100, maximum 200.
searchKeywords	array	Title search, Chinese or English.
subjectType	string	all, movie, book or music. Filters search results.
maxResultsPerKeyword	integer	Default 20.
maxSubjectsFromSearch	integer	Reviews and comments for the top N titles of each keyword. Default 0.
maxItems	integer	Cap on all rows. Default 1,000; free-plan runs return up to 100.

Example input

Reviews and comments for a book, plus the top 3 movies for a keyword:

{
  "subjectUrls": ["https://book.douban.com/subject/2567698/"],
  "searchKeywords": ["流浪地球"],
  "subjectType": "movie",
  "maxSubjectsFromSearch": 3,
  "maxCommentsPerSubject": 200
}

Output Samples

A review:

{
  "type": "review",
  "reviewId": "1342728",
  "url": "https://book.douban.com/review/1342728/",
  "subjectId": "2567698",
  "subjectType": "book",
  "subjectTitle": "三体",
  "title": "《三体》：当代史的科幻书写",
  "text": "评论刘慈欣的《三体》是件困难的事情，因为可以选择的角度太多……",
  "textLength": 3265,
  "stars": 4,
  "ratingLabel": "推荐",
  "replyCount": 268,
  "authorName": "胤祥",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.douban.com/people/yinxiang/",
  "postedAt": "2008-04-02T19:20:04+00:00"
}

A short comment:

{
  "type": "comment",
  "commentId": "851912743",
  "subjectTitle": "三体",
  "subjectType": "book",
  "text": "论文笔的重要性。。。如何讲砸一个好故事。。。",
  "stars": 3,
  "ratingLabel": "还行",
  "votes": 980,
  "authorName": "张熊熊",
  "postedAt": "2014-10-07T09:02:08+00:00"
}

A search result:

{
  "type": "subject",
  "subjectId": "26647087",
  "subjectType": "movie",
  "title": "三体",
  "rating": 8.7,
  "ratingScale": 10,
  "directors": ["杨磊"],
  "cast": ["张鲁一", "于和伟", "陈瑾", "王子文", "林永健"],
  "url": "https://movie.douban.com/subject/26647087/",
  "searchKeyword": "三体"
}

Key Output Fields

Field	Meaning
type	subject, review or comment
stars	1-5, as shown on Douban; null when the writer gave none
ratingLabel	Douban's word for the stars: 力荐 5, 推荐 4, 还行 3, 较差 2, 很差 1
rating	The title's Douban score out of 10 (search rows)
votes	"Helpful" votes on a short comment
textLength	Characters in the review text
source	url or search; search rows also carry searchKeyword

FAQ

How many reviews do I get per title? About 20, the ones Douban ranks as most helpful. Asking for more does not return more.

Why are there no short comments for movies? Douban is not serving movie short comments right now. Book and music comments work. Movies return reviews; their empty comment calls are not charged, and the run log says so. They will come back on their own when Douban serves them again.

Does search find movies? Not reliably. Douban's search answers books best: a movie title often returns only the book of the same name, and English titles return nothing. For a movie or an album, paste its Douban link (the number in movie.douban.com/subject/

Can I search by director or actor? No, search matches titles only.

Do I need a Douban account or cookies? No.

Are empty results charged? No. You pay only for rows delivered.

Pricing

Event	When	Price
Actor start	Once per run (per GB of memory, 256 MB default)	$0.005
Review	Each long-form review	$0.01
Short comment	Each short comment	$0.002
Search result	Each title from a search	$0.002

Example: reviews and 100 comments for 10 books cost about 10 × (20 × $0.01 + 100 × $0.002) = $4.00.

Support

Found a bug or need a field? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab and include the run link.

Explore More Scrapers

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⚠️ Disclaimer

This actor reads public pages of Douban. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Douban. You are responsible for using the data in line with Douban's terms, copyright and the privacy laws that apply to you, including China's PIPL and the GDPR where relevant. Reviews and comments are written by Douban users and remain their work.

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