Pricing

Pay per usage

Open Library Books Search

Search 40M+ books on Open Library by title, author, ISBN, or subject via the public JSON API. Returns structured records with publishers, publication years, ISBNs, page counts, language, and cover art. CC0 data.

Pricing

Pay per usage

Rating

0.0

(0)

Developer

Mori

Actor stats

Bookmarked

Total users

Monthly active users

6 days ago

Last modified

Why this actor

Open Library is the Internet Archive's open bibliographic data project. The data is CC0 (public domain) where possible, and the /search.json endpoint is unauthenticated and keyless. Existing Apify scrapers in this niche scrape HTML pages page-by-page; this actor wraps the JSON API end-to-end — cleaner, faster, and structured from the source.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
`queries`	`string[]`	`["tolkien","haruki murakami","agatha christie"]`	One row per query. Free-form: titles, authors, ISBNs, subjects.
`limit`	`integer` (1-50)	`10`	Max records per query.
`sort`	`enum` (`relevance` / `new` / `old`)	`relevance`	`new`/`old` sort by first publish year.
`languageFilter`	`string[]`	`[]`	Optional ISO-639-3 codes (e.g. `["eng","fre"]`).
`fields`	`string[]`	curated subset	Advanced: override the Open Library `fields` query param.

Output (one record per matched book)

{
  "query": "tolkien",
  "workKey": "/works/OL27448W",
  "title": "The Lord of the Rings",
  "authors": "J.R.R. Tolkien",
  "firstPublishYear": "1954",
  "publishYears": "1954; 1965; 1966; 1967; ...",
  "isbn": "9780739409558; 0261103938; 0395604230; ...",
  "publishers": "Houghton Mifflin; HarperCollins; ...",
  "subjects": "Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Middle Earth (Imaginary place); ...",
  "languages": "eng; fre; spa; ger; ...",
  "editionCount": "251",
  "pageCountMedian": "1193",
  "coverId": "14625765",
  "coverUrl": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14625765-L.jpg",
  "openLibraryWorkUrl": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL27448W",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-07-10T18:42:00.000Z"
}

Why it works without a proxy

Open Library's /search.json endpoint serves all datacenter IPs. We send a polite, identifiable User-Agent so the Internet Archive can contact the operator if ever needed. If you scale up to hundreds of queries per minute, register for their API keys and add a User-Agent header — the free tier is enough for actor-scale traffic.

License

Open Library data is CC0 where possible. The actor source is MIT.

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