Open Library Search Scraper 📚 — Find Books by Title, Author or Subject

Search the world's largest open book catalogue and export structured book data — no API key, no login, no rate-limit headaches.

This Apify actor turns Open Library (the Internet Archive's open book database, 40M+ works) into a clean, paginated dataset. Give it a search term, an author name or a subject, and get back titles, authors, publication years, publishers, ISBNs, languages, subjects, edition counts, star ratings, reading-list stats, full-text availability and high-resolution cover URLs.

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🔍 How is this different from open-library-book-scraper?

This is the discovery / search counterpart to my other actor. They solve two opposite problems:

	Open Library Search Scraper (this actor)	Open Library Book Scraper
You start with	A question: "sci-fi books", "Le Guin", "dune"	A known identifier: an ISBN or an Open Library work/edition ID
Answers	"Which books exist that match this?"	"What do I know about this exact book?"
Input	Free-text queries, author names, subjects	ISBN-10/ISBN-13, work keys, edition keys
Output	Ranked lists of matching works — many books per query	Deep record for one specific book
Extra fields	Ratings, edition counts, want-to-read/already-read counts, full-text & public-scan flags, people/places	Edition-level detail for the looked-up book
Typical use	Building catalogues, discovery feeds, genre datasets	Enriching an existing ISBN list

Rule of thumb: if you have ISBNs, use open-library-book-scraper. If you need to find books in the first place, use this actor. Many users run this one to build a list, then pipe the ISBNs into the other for deeper enrichment.

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✨ Features

• Three search modes — free-text search, author and subject
• Ratings & popularity — average star rating, rating count, want-to-read and already-read counts
• Edition intelligence — edition counts, median page count, publisher list, up to 10 ISBNs per work
• Availability signals — has_fulltext and public_scan tell you what's readable for free on the Internet Archive
• Cover images — ready-to-use large cover URLs
• Rich metadata — subjects, languages, characters (people), settings (places), opening sentence
• Automatic pagination — offsets handled for you, up to 1,000 books per run
• Deduplication — results deduped by Open Library work key across all your terms
• No API key. No proxies required. Open Library's JSON API is fully public.

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💰 Pricing

Roughly $0.50 per 1,000 books on Apify's pay-per-event compute. Runs at 512 MB, and a 100-book run typically completes in well under a minute. No third-party API costs — Open Library is free and open.

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🚀 Input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["dune", "neuromancer"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Search by author:

{
  "mode": "author",
  "authors": ["Ursula K. Le Guin", "Isaac Asimov"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Search by subject/genre:

{
  "mode": "subject",
  "subjects": ["science_fiction", "historical fiction"],
  "maxItems": 500
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	search (free text), author (by author name), subject (by genre/subject)
queries	array	["dune","neuromancer"]	Free-text terms — used in search mode
authors	array	–	Author names — used in author mode
subjects	array	–	Subjects/genres — used in subject mode (spaces auto-converted to underscores)
maxItems	integer	100	Max books across all terms combined (max 1000)

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📦 Output

One dataset item per book (work):

{
  "work_key": "/works/OL893516W",
  "title": "Children of Dune",
  "subtitle": null,
  "authors": ["Frank Herbert"],
  "author_keys": ["OL79034A"],
  "first_publish_year": 1976,
  "publishers": ["Ace Books", "Berkley Publishing", "Gollancz"],
  "isbns": ["0425071790", "9780441104024"],
  "languages": ["eng", "ger", "fre"],
  "subjects": ["Dune (Imaginary place)", "Fiction", "Science fiction"],
  "edition_count": 77,
  "page_count_median": 504,
  "rating": 3.9574,
  "ratings_count": 47,
  "want_to_read": 277,
  "already_read": 132,
  "has_fulltext": true,
  "public_scan": false,
  "first_sentence": "A SPOT of light appeared on the deep red rug...",
  "people": ["Paul Atreides"],
  "places": ["Arrakis"],
  "cover_url": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6976407-L.jpg",
  "url": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL893516W",
  "source": "openlibrary",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T13:00:00+00:00",
  "input_term": "dune",
  "input_mode": "search"
}

Every field is nullable — Open Library is community-maintained, so coverage varies by book. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or via the Apify API.

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🎯 Use cases

• Book discovery apps — power search, "more like this" and browse-by-genre features without building your own index
• Library & catalogue apps — check which editions and ISBNs exist for a title before ordering or cataloguing
• Reading datasets for research & ML — build genre-labelled corpora with ratings and publication years for analysis
• Recommendation engines — combine subjects, people, places and rating signals into a content-based recommender
• Bookstore & publisher intelligence — see which publishers dominate a genre and how many editions a work has spawned
• Free-to-read audits — filter on has_fulltext and public_scan to surface books legally readable on the Internet Archive

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🔗 Related actors by ninhothedev

• Open Library Book Scraper — ISBN & work-ID lookups (the enrichment counterpart to this actor)
• HathiTrust Scraper — academic & digitized library holdings
• Google Books Scraper — Google Books metadata, previews and sales links
• Project Gutenberg Scraper — 70k+ free public-domain ebooks with download links

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❓ FAQ

Do I need an Open Library API key? No. The search endpoint is public and free.

How many books can I get per run? Up to 1,000 per run (maxItems). Run the actor multiple times with different terms for larger datasets.

Are results deduplicated? Yes — by Open Library work key, across all your queries in a single run.

Why is a field empty? Open Library data is crowd-sourced. Rating and page-count fields only exist for books that readers have logged. All fields are nullable by design.

Can I search by ISBN here? You can, but the dedicated Open Library Book Scraper is purpose-built for that and returns more edition-level detail.

Is scraping Open Library allowed? Open Library publishes an open, documented JSON API intended for public use. This actor sends a descriptive user agent and paginates politely.

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🛠 Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m src.main
python tests/test_smoke.py   # offline smoke tests

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Data source: Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Internet Archive.