📚 OpenStax Textbooks Scraper

🚀 Export OpenStax records in seconds. Pipe results straight into your spreadsheet, dashboard, or data warehouse.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 10 fields per record · Public OpenStax data · Real-time updates

The OpenStax Textbooks Scraper turns the public OpenStax CMS endpoint into a clean structured dataset of open educational textbooks. Every record carries title, subject, edition, authors, license, ISBN, page count, language, and direct download links.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
🎓 Students	Find free textbooks for class.
👩‍🏫 Educators	Build reading lists from open content.
📚 Librarians	Track new OpenStax releases.
🤖 EdTech builders	Power discovery features with open data.

📋 What the OpenStax Textbooks Scraper does

• Fetches the public OpenStax feed at https://openstax.org/apps/cms/api/v2/pages/.
• Parses the response and flattens each record into one structured row.
• Casts numeric values to numbers, dates to ISO strings.
• Surfaces upstream errors as a clean error record instead of crashing.
• Pushes everything to the dataset, ready for instant download.

💡 Why it matters: OpenStax publishes the data, but the raw response is awkward to work with. This actor normalizes everything into a flat schema that drops straight into pandas, BigQuery, or a Google Sheet.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

See the Input tab on the Apify console for the full list of supported filters. Every filter is optional. maxItems controls how many records are returned.

Example

{
  "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know. Free users are capped at 10 records per run as a preview. Paid users can pull up to 1,000,000 records.

📊 Output

Each record is a flat object. The error field is always last.

Field	Type	Description
📚 title	string	Textbook title.
🏷️ subject	string	Subject area.
📖 edition	string	Edition label.
✍️ authors	array	List of author names.
⚖️ license	string	Creative Commons license.
🔢 isbn	string	ISBN identifier if available.
📄 pages	number	Page count.
🗣️ language	string	Primary language.
📥 downloadFormats	array	Available download formats.
🔗 url	string	Public OpenStax URL.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	When this row was fetched.
❌ error	string	Set if the upstream response was an error.

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🆓 | Works with the free Apify plan (10-record preview). | | 🧹 | Clean snake_case keys ready for BI tools. | | 🔢 | Auto-casts numeric and date fields. | | 🛟 | Surfaces upstream errors as a clean record. | | 💾 | Push to dataset and download in any supported format. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup time	Clean keys	Numeric casting	Error handling
Roll your own fetch	30 min +	No	No	No
This Actor	5 sec, no install	Yes	Yes	Yes

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Adjust the input filters or leave defaults.
3. Click Start. Within seconds, your dataset is ready.

💼 Business use cases

🎓 Course planning. Pull every OpenStax title in a subject and pick the right edition for your syllabus.

📚 Library catalogs. Sync OpenStax metadata into your library system on a schedule.

🤖 EdTech discovery. Power search and recommendation features in your learning app.

🌍 Translation projects. Identify titles by language to coordinate volunteer translation efforts.

🔌 Automating OpenStax Textbooks Scraper

• Make / Zapier. Trigger this actor on a schedule, push results to Airtable, Slack, or your CRM.
• Cron schedule. Apify's native scheduler runs this on whatever cadence you need.
• Webhooks. Get a POST to your endpoint the moment a run finishes.
• Pipe to your warehouse. Native Apify integrations move datasets straight into BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education. Use real public data for classroom projects.

🧪 Personal research. Build your own dashboards and notebooks.

🤝 Non-profit & open data. Power public dashboards without writing client code.

🧰 Tinkering & prototyping. Spin up a fresh data feed in seconds.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Pop this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your specific workflow to the actor's inputs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Is the data free to use? OpenStax publishes everything under Creative Commons licenses. Check each record's license field for specifics.

❓ How fresh is the data? Pulled live from the OpenStax CMS API on every run.

❓ Can I filter by subject? Yes, pick a subject from the dropdown.

❓ Are all formats listed? Yes. The downloadFormats array surfaces every download option.

❓ Does this need an API key? No. The OpenStax API is fully public.

❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes, via Apify's native scheduler or Make / Zapier.

❓ Will the schema change? The core fields are stable.

❓ Is this scraping or API? API. OpenStax exposes a public CMS endpoint.

❓ What if a field is null? Some optional fields (ISBN, pages) are only set when OpenStax publishes them.

❓ What output format can I download? Every Apify-supported export format is available straight from the dataset UI.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint.

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