🚀 Open Library Authors Scraper

Find comprehensive author profiles and complete book lists from Open Library in minutes. This tool collects detailed author information including biography, publication history, reader ratings, and external identifiers from Goodreads, Wikidata, and VIAF. Perfect for literary researchers, book enthusiasts, librarians, and anyone building an author database. No coding skills required - just search for an author and download the results as CSV, JSON, or Excel.

The Open Library Authors Scraper makes author research effortless. Whether you're analyzing literary trends, building a book recommendation system, or creating an author database, this tool extracts rich author metadata directly from Open Library's public database. It handles everything automatically - from finding authors to gathering their complete bibliographies with reader engagement metrics.

✨ What Does It Do

• Author Name & Biography - Collects full author names, personal names, alternate names, and detailed biographies for context about the author's life and work
• Birth and Death Dates - Captures birth and death dates (when available) to help with historical research and author timeline analysis
• Author Photos - Extracts author profile photos to create visual-rich author directories and presentation materials
• Complete Bibliography - Collects the full list of works (books) written by each author, enabling comprehensive publication tracking and reading lists
• Work Count & Top Works - Shows total number of published works and identifies the author's most significant publication for quick reference
• Reader Engagement Metrics - Collects ratings average, ratings count, "want to read" count, and "already read" count for understanding reader interest and book popularity
• Subject Classification - Gathers top subjects and genres associated with each author to identify their writing focus and literary specialization
• External Author IDs - Extracts Goodreads IDs, Wikidata IDs, and VIAF IDs to cross-reference authors across multiple literary databases and platforms
• Related Links - Captures external links to author websites, social media, and other resources for additional author information and verification

📋 How to Use

No technical skills required. The entire process takes just a few clicks.

1. Sign Up: Create a free account w/ $5 credit

2. Find the Actor: Search for "Open Library Authors Scraper" in the Apify marketplace or navigate directly to the actor page

3. Set Your Search: Enter an author name (like "George Orwell" or "Jane Austen") or paste a direct author URL. Choose how many authors to retrieve and whether to include their complete book lists

4. Configure Options (optional): Decide if you want the full bibliography for each author, adjust the maximum number of works per author, and set the concurrency level based on your needs

5. Run the Scraper: Click the "Start" button and watch the progress indicator. The tool handles all the searching and data collection automatically

6. Download Results: Once complete, download your data as CSV (for Excel), JSON (for applications), or keep it in the web interface for browsing

7. Schedule Runs (optional): Set up automatic runs on a schedule to monitor author data changes over time

The entire process requires zero coding knowledge. Everything is point-and-click.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Open Library, the Internet Archive, or any of their subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: alreadyReadCount, alternateNames, authorKey, bio, birthDate, deathDate, goodreadsId, links, name, personalName, photoUrl, ratingsAverage, ratingsCount, results, scrapedAt, topSubjects, topWork, url, viafId, wantToReadCount, wikidataId, workCount, works. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.