Google Books Scraper

Extracts books, authors, ISBNs, publishers, dates, descriptions, covers, categories, and preview links from Google Books search results.

What this Actor collects

The Actor converts Google Books results into one clean JSON record per book, including authors, identifiers, publisher and publication date, description, categories, cover images, preview links, availability, and search provenance when available.

• Uses the input limits and filters below to control the crawl.
• Stores source-backed fields defined by the 56-field dataset schema.
• Omits optional fields when the source does not expose a value instead of writing nulls or fabricated placeholders.

Use cases

• Book and author discovery
• ISBN and publication-catalog enrichment
• Publisher, category, and availability research

Input

Provide input in JSON. Fields marked required must be supplied. The Default / example column shows a schema default when one exists; otherwise it shows a documented prefill or fixture value.

Field	Type	Required	Default / example	Description
query	string	Yes	"machine learning"	The search term for books (e.g. 'machine learning', 'fiction bestsellers')
maxItems	integer	No	10	Maximum number of book results to retrieve
gl	string	No	"us"	Two-letter country code (e.g. 'us', 'uk', 'in')
hl	string	No	"en"	Two-letter language code (e.g. 'en', 'es', 'de')
maxRequestRetries	integer	No	3	Retries for failed, blocked, or malformed feed requests.
requestTimeoutSecs	integer	No	30	Per-request timeout in seconds.
apiKey	string	No	—	Optional secret Google Books API key; never written to dataset URLs or logs.
proxyConfiguration	object	No	{"useApifyProxy":false}	Optional proxy settings used only by the browser fallback.

Example input

{
  "query": "machine learning",
  "maxItems": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  },
  "gl": "us",
  "hl": "en",
  "maxRequestRetries": 3,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 30
}

Output

The default dataset contains one item per book result. The following are the most useful fields; identifiers, description, cover, preview, rating, and availability fields depend on the source record.

Field	Type	Description
position	integer	Position
title	string	Book Title
authors	array	Authors
publisher	string	Publisher
isbn13	string	ISBN-13
publishedDate	string	Published Date
pageCount	integer	Page Count
language	string	Book Language
previewUrl	string	Preview URL
searchQuery	string	Search Query
scrapedAt	string	Scraped At
type	string	Type
description	string	Description
source	string	Source
sourcePage	integer	Source Page
sourceStartIndex	integer	Source Start Index

Example dataset item

This compact example is taken from local Actor storage. Long text and nested collections are shortened for documentation only.

{
  "position": 1,
  "title": "An Introduction to Machine Learning",
  "authors": [
    "Gopinath Rebala",
    "Ajay Ravi"
  ],
  "publisher": "Springer",
  "isbn13": "9783030157296",
  "publishedDate": "2019-05-07",
  "pageCount": 275,
  "language": "en",
  "previewUrl": "http://books.google.com/books?id=u8OWDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=machine+learning&cd=1&source=gbs_gdata",
  "searchQuery": "machine learning",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-23T19:39:25.899Z",
  "type": "book"
}

Related Actors

• Google About This Result Scraper
• Google AI Overview Scraper
• Google Autocomplete Scraper