Open Library Book Scraper — 45M+ Books, Authors, and Editions

$0.005 per record · Rich book and author metadata from Open Library — the Internet Archive's open book catalog with 45M+ works, 80M+ editions, ISBNs, subjects, covers, and author bios.

Built for book recommendation engines, library automation, reading-list apps, competitor analysis for publishers, and LLM/RAG corpora on literature.

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What You Get

• Search — find books by title, author, subject, or ISBN
• Book details — full work metadata: editions, subjects, covers, first-publish year, description
• Author details — biography, photo, work count, alternate names, birth/death dates
• Trending — currently popular works (great for homepages)
• Structured output — JSON with stable Open Library keys, ready for downstream pipelines
• No authentication required — public Open Library API

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4 Use Cases (ready-to-run JSON inputs)

1. Book recommendation engine (search by subject)

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "science fiction",
  "limit": 50,
  "sort": "editions"
}

Top 50 sci-fi works sorted by edition count (proxy for popularity and cross-language availability). Perfect for seed data in recommender systems.

2. Build a book catalog for an app

{
  "mode": "book_details",
  "workKey": "OL27448W"
}

Full work detail (subjects, editions, description, covers) for "The Lord of the Rings". Use for book pages in reading apps, library systems, or RAG over literary knowledge.

3. Author intelligence

{
  "mode": "author_details",
  "authorKey": "OL23919A"
}

Full profile for a specific author (bio, photo, work count, birth/death dates). Great for author pages or literary research.

4. What's popular right now

{
  "mode": "trending",
  "limit": 20
}

Top 20 trending works on Open Library — use as a daily "what's hot" feed for a reading newsletter or a public library homepage.

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Input Schema

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	enum	search	search / book_details / author_details / trending
query	string	—	Search term (title, author, subject, ISBN)
limit	integer	10	Max results (1–100)
sort	enum	relevance	relevance / editions / old / new
language	string	—	ISO-3 language code (eng, spa, fre, rus, …)
workKey	string	—	Open Library work key (OL27448W or /works/OL27448W)
authorKey	string	—	Open Library author key (OL23919A or /authors/OL23919A)

Output (sample — book_details)

{
  "key": "/works/OL27448W",
  "title": "The Lord of the Rings",
  "description": "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them...",
  "first_publish_year": 1954,
  "subjects": ["Fantasy fiction", "Middle Earth", "Wizards"],
  "authors": [{"key": "/authors/OL26320A", "name": "J.R.R. Tolkien"}],
  "covers": [{"id": 12345, "url": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/12345-L.jpg"}],
  "edition_count": 120,
  "language_codes": ["eng", "rus", "spa", "fre", "deu"],
  "openlibrary_url": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL27448W"
}

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Pricing & Performance

• Pay-per-event: $0.005 per book or author record
• Typical cost: $0.05 for 10 books, $0.50 for 100 books, $5 for 1,000 records
• Speed: ~10–20 records/second (rate-limit-safe)
• Free Apify tier: $5/month credit = ~1,000 records

Compare to commercial book data APIs (Google Books quotas, Goodreads sunset): Open Library is openly licensed (CC0 / CC-BY-SA) and you pay only for extraction.

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Integrations

• Algolia / Meilisearch / Elasticsearch — index titles/subjects for book search
• Zapier / Make / n8n — new-release → Notion / Airtable / Slack
• LangChain / LlamaIndex — RAG over literary works (book summaries, subjects, author bios)
• Vector DBs (Pinecone / Weaviate / Qdrant) — embed descriptions/subjects for semantic "similar books"
• Neo4j / Graphiti — author→works→subject graph for literary knowledge graphs
• Python SDK

  from apify_client import ApifyClient
  client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_TOKEN>")
  run = client.actor("Helpermara/openlibrary-scraper").call(run_input={
      "mode": "search",
      "query": "haruki murakami",
      "limit": 20
  })
  for book in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
      print(book["title"], book.get("first_publish_year"))
  

• JavaScript SDK

  import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
  const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_TOKEN>' });
  const { defaultDatasetId } = await client.actor('Helpermara/openlibrary-scraper').call({
    mode: 'trending', limit: 20
  });
  const { items } = await client.dataset(defaultDatasetId).listItems();
  console.log(items);
  

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FAQ

How complete is Open Library? 45M+ works, 80M+ editions, ~10M+ authors. Coverage is strongest for English-language fiction/non-fiction; growing for other languages.

Covers? Yes — every book record includes cover image URLs at S/M/L sizes (hosted by Internet Archive).

ISBN lookup? Use search mode with an ISBN string as the query — Open Library supports ISBN-10 and ISBN-13.

What's the difference vs Google Books? Open Library is openly licensed (no API key quotas) and has better metadata for editions/translations. Google Books has stronger full-text search and preview snippets.

Are author death dates reliable? Mostly yes for mainstream authors; long-tail authors may lack death dates. Use author_details to check completeness.

License? Apify actor is free with pay-per-event pricing. Open Library data is CC0 (metadata) / CC-BY-SA (full-text).

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Companion Actors

• Wikipedia Scraper — article data for book contextualization (author pages, movement pages)
• CrossRef Scraper — 150M+ scholarly works (link books to academic citations)
• Semantic Scholar Scraper — literary studies papers
• Medium Article Scraper — book reviews and literary essays

Use together for a complete book-knowledge stack — catalog + context + reviews + scholarship.

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Keywords

open library, books, book metadata, isbn, authors, editions, work key, book api, library automation, book recommendation, reading app, cover images, subjects, literary data, book search, goodreads alternative, google books alternative, internet archive, bibliographic data, catalog, book dataset

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Changelog

• 2026-04-24 — README rewrite: 4 use cases, pricing, integrations, FAQ
• Prior — stable; 4 modes (search / book_details / author_details / trending)