📚 Open Library Scraper

🚀 Extract book data from Open Library in seconds. Search by title, author, or subject with ebook filtering. No coding, no API keys required.

Open Library is the Internet Archive's free, open catalog of every book ever published. This scraper connects to Open Library's public API and returns structured book data including titles, authors, ISBNs, publishers, cover images, ratings, descriptions, page counts, and download links. It supports 5 search types (Books, Authors, Search Inside, Subjects, and Lists), handles pagination automatically, and exports data as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Whether you are building a book recommendation engine, tracking ISBN availability, or conducting bibliographic research, this actor delivers structured data for up to 1,000,000 records per run for paid users. Each result includes cover images, publication dates, publisher names, available formats (PDF, EPUB, AZW3), community ratings, edition counts, and subject classifications. No manual searching, copying, or format conversion needed.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Use Cases
Librarians	Build digital catalogs with cover images and ISBNs
Publishers	Research publication history and edition counts
Book bloggers	Generate reading lists with ratings and descriptions
Data scientists	Analyze publishing trends by subject and year
App developers	Feed book metadata into recommendation engines
Educators	Curate subject-specific reading lists for courses

📋 What the Open Library Scraper does

• 🔍 Keyword search across books, authors, subjects, lists, and full-text content
• 📖 Ebook filtering to show only books available as free digital downloads
• 🖼️ Cover image extraction with URLs for small, medium, and large sizes
• 📊 Edition and rating data including community ratings and total edition counts
• 📥 Download link collection for PDF, EPUB, and AZW3 formats when available
• 🌐 Direct URL support to scrape any Open Library search results page

The scraper sends your query to Open Library's public API, retrieves matching records, and extracts full metadata for each item. For book searches, it collects titles, authors, ISBNs, publishers, page counts, descriptions, cover images, ratings, available formats, and download links. For author searches, it returns author profiles with their works. Every record is timestamped and includes a direct link to the Open Library entry.

💡 Why it matters: Open Library contains metadata for millions of books, but browsing and exporting data manually is tedious. This scraper automates collection and delivers clean, structured data ready for databases, spreadsheets, or applications.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: author, availableFormats, coverImages, detailUrl, downloadLinks, editionCount, fullDescription, imageUrl, isbn, itemId, language, numberOfPages, publicationDate, publishers, rating, scrapedTimestamp, subjectTags, subjects, title. All 19 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: Use either a Start URL or search filters, not both. If you provide a Start URL, search filters are ignored. The ebooks-only filter only works with the "books" search type.

🚀 How to use

1. Create an Apify account - Sign up free with $5 credit
2. Open the Open Library Scraper - Navigate to the actor page on Apify
3. Enter your search query - Type a title, author name, or subject
4. Select search type and filters - Choose Books, Authors, Subjects, etc. and enable ebook filtering if needed
5. Click Start - The actor collects matching records and delivers structured data

⏱️ A typical run with 10 books completes in under 30 seconds.

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💡 Pro Tip: Combine the Open Library Scraper with the Crossref Scraper to match book ISBNs with DOI metadata and citation counts.

Disclaimer: This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Open Library or the Internet Archive. It accesses publicly available data through Open Library's public API. Use responsibly and in accordance with applicable terms of service.

🆘 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.

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