Open Library books - search, editions, authors (public API)

Returns: one row per Open Library work (book): key, title, subtitle, authors (names + keys + URLs), first publish year, edition count, ISBNs, subjects, languages, publishers, median page count, member ratings and reading counts, full-text / e-book availability, cover URL, Open Library URL. Input: { "query": "python programming", "max_records": 100 } or { "author": "tolkien", "subject": "fantasy", "first_publish_year_from": 1930, "first_publish_year_to": 1980, "sort": "rating" } — at least one of query, title, author, subject. Price: $5.00 per 1,000 rows ($0.005 per work row) plus $0.10 per run. Pay per event; no subscription.

Search Open Library's catalogue of 20+ million works by free text, title, author, subject, first-publish-year range and language — sorted by relevance, year, rating or edition count — and get a flat, normalised row per work, ready for CSV or JSON: reading lists, ISBN lookups for a subject, author bibliographies, "books about X published between Y and Z". No key, no login: the public openlibrary.org/search.json API.

The default input (query python programming, 100 rows) succeeds within 5 minutes and returns rows — Apify auto-tests it daily.

Data source and status

Publisher	Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive (https://openlibrary.org)
API	GET /search.json?q=&title=&author=&subject=&language=&sort=&fields=&limit=100&page= — public, no key. Documentation: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/search
What this Actor reads	Plain GET requests with an explicit fields list, at most one per request_interval_ms (default 1,000 ms, floor 500 ms); year ranges use the Solr field query first_publish_year:[FROM TO TO]
Identification	Open Library asks API users to send a descriptive User-Agent with a contact (https://openlibrary.org/developers/api). The Actor sends its product-token User-Agent with the contact e-mail in the comment and in the standard From: header
Refresh cadence	Live on every run; fetched_at on each row is the fetch time
Licence / attribution	Open Library data are open — the catalogue is released under a public-domain / CC0 style licence for records, but please credit Open Library / Internet Archive when you republish. Cover images (cover_url) are served by covers.openlibrary.org under their own usage terms (do not hot-link at scale)
Known caveats	Rows are works, not editions: isbn lists ISBNs across all editions (cut to 10; isbn_count is the total), subjects is cut to 25 (subject_count is the total); rating_average/rating_count and the reading counts come from Open Library members and are empty for most works; first_publish_year can be missing or wrong on community-edited records; the search index lags catalogue edits by minutes to hours; deep paging beyond a few thousand rows gets slow on the API side

Honesty note: the rows are the search API's own work-level fields renamed and flattened — nothing is inferred, summarised or classified by this Actor, and a run stops with an error rather than guess when the API's shape changes.

Input

Field	Type	Meaning
query	string	Free text (title, author, subject, text). Solr field syntax such as publisher:penguin works
title	string	Title words
author	string	Author name
subject	string	Subject, e.g. fantasy, machine learning
first_publish_year_from / first_publish_year_to	integer	Inclusive year bounds
language	string	3-letter MARC code: eng, fre, ger, spa, jpn
sort	string	relevance (default), new, old, rating, editions, title
max_records	integer	Default 100, at most 10,000
request_interval_ms	integer	Default 1000 (floor 500)
contact_email	string	Sent in the User-Agent comment and the From: header

Example — Tolkien's English-language fantasy works first published 1930-1980, best rated first:

{ "author": "tolkien", "subject": "fantasy", "first_publish_year_from": 1930, "first_publish_year_to": 1980, "language": "eng", "sort": "rating", "max_records": 25 }

Output (dataset row)

key (/works/OL27482W), work_id, title, subtitle, authors, author_keys, author_urls, first_publish_year, edition_count, isbn_count, isbn (first 10), subject_count, subjects (first 25), languages, publishers (first 10), pages_median, rating_average, rating_count, want_to_read_count, currently_reading_count, already_read_count, has_fulltext, ebook_access, archive_org_ids, first_sentence, cover_id, cover_url (medium JPEG), cover_edition_key, url, json_url, fetched_at, source.

A run summary (filters, Open Library's own match count, pages, requests, whether the pay-per-event budget stopped the run) is stored as RUN_SUMMARY in the run's key-value store.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price
run-start — once per run	$0.10
record — per row written	$0.005

The default run (100 rows) costs $0.60; 1,000 work rows cost $5.10. Rows stop when your run's maximum charge is reached; the run summary says so.

Operator

Steelyard Ventures LLC (RetrainMap) — info@steelyardclinical.com. Not affiliated with Open Library or the Internet Archive. The Actor writes only to its own dataset and key-value store; it stores no credentials and sends nothing else.