Goodreads Scraper

Extract book data from Goodreads — the world's largest book recommendation platform with 150M+ members, 3.5B+ books cataloged, and 90M+ reviews.

No existing Goodreads scraper on Apify Store. First-mover advantage in this valuable niche.

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Why Goodreads?

Goodreads is the definitive source for book metadata — ratings, reviews, genres, author info, series data, and more. Publishers, authors, marketers, librarians, and AI/ML teams all need this data:

• Publishers — track ratings and reviews for competitive titles
• Authors — monitor your book's performance and discoverability
• Market researchers — analyze genre trends, rating distributions, publication patterns
• AI/ML teams — build training datasets for recommendation systems, NLP models, book classifiers
• Librarians — enrich catalog metadata with crowdsourced ratings and genres

Features

• 🔍 Search anything — books by title, author, or keyword
• 📚 Rich book data — title, author, rating, ratings count, reviews count, ISBN, ISBN-13, pages, publisher, publication year, format
• 🏷️ Genres & shelves — extract all genre tags/categories for each book
• 🏆 Awards — see which awards each book has won
• 📖 Full descriptions — get the complete book description text
• 🔗 Series data — identify series and series position
• 📊 Rating analytics — average rating and total rating counts
• 🔄 Smart sorting — by relevance, highest rated, or newest first
• 📄 Automatic pagination — paginates through all search results up to your max
• 🛡️ Anti-bot resistant — headless browser with stealth techniques
• 💰 Pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you use
• 🔌 API-first — call via REST API, Apify SDK, Python, or Zapier

Pricing

Event	Price
Run start	$0.50 per run
Per book scraped	$0.001 per book

A typical search for "science fiction" (1,000 results) would cost ~$1.50. A small search (50 books) costs ~$0.55.

Quick Start

Via Apify Console

1. Go to Goodreads Scraper in Apify Console
2. Click Run and fill in the fields:
   • search — what to look for (e.g. "Dune", "Stephen King", "fantasy")
   • maxItems — how many books to scrape (default: 50, max: 1000)
   • sort — sort order: relevance (default), highest rated, or newest first
3. Wait for the run to complete
4. Download results as JSON, CSV, or Excel

Via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/~goodreads-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "search": "The Name of the Wind",
    "maxItems": 50,
    "sort": "relevance"
  }'

Via Apify SDK (Node.js)

import { Actor } from 'apify';

const run = await Actor.call('~goodreads-scraper', {
  search: 'The Name of the Wind',
  maxItems: 50,
  sort: 'rating',
});

const { items } = await Actor.openDataset(run.defaultDatasetId);
console.log(items);

Via Python

import requests

response = requests.post(
    'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/~goodreads-scraper/runs',
    params={'token': 'YOUR_API_TOKEN'},
    json={
        'search': 'The Name of the Wind',
        'maxItems': 50,
        'sort': 'relevance'
    }
)
run = response.json()
print(f'Run ID: {run["data"]["id"]}')

Via Webhook/Zapier

Configure a webhook in Apify Console to send data directly to Zapier, Make (formerly Integromat), Slack, Google Sheets, or any HTTP endpoint.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
search	string	required	Search keyword, title, or author name
maxItems	number	50	Max books to scrape (1–1000)
sort	string	relevance	Sort order: relevance, rating, date
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify proxy	Proxy configuration (recommended for large runs)

Output Schema

Each scraped book returns the following fields:

#	Field	Type	Description
1	id	number	Goodreads book ID
2	title	string | null	Book title
3	author	string | null	Author name
4	authorUrl	string | null	Author profile URL
5	rating	number | null	Average rating (0–5)
6	ratingsCount	number | null	Number of ratings
7	reviewsCount	number | null	Number of text reviews
8	isbn	string | null	ISBN-10 identifier
9	isbn13	string | null	ISBN-13 identifier
10	pages	number | null	Number of pages
11	publicationYear	number | null	Year of publication
12	publisher	string | null	Publisher name
13	description	string | null	Full book description
14	genres	string[]	Genre/category tags (up to 30)
15	awards	string[]	Awards the book has won
16	imageUrl	string | null	Book cover image URL
17	format	string | null	Book format (Paperback, Hardcover)
18	series	string | null	Series name (if part of a series)
19	url	string	Goodreads book page URL
20	price	number | null	Price (if available)
21	scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of scrape

Sample Output

{
  "id": 186074,
  "title": "The Name of the Wind",
  "author": "Patrick Rothfuss",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/108713.Patrick_Rothfuss",
  "rating": 4.53,
  "ratingsCount": 1051940,
  "reviewsCount": 76291,
  "isbn": "0575081406",
  "isbn13": "9780575081406",
  "pages": 662,
  "publicationYear": 2007,
  "publisher": "Gollancz",
  "description": "Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man...",
  "genres": ["Fantasy", "Fiction", "High Fantasy", "Epic Fantasy", "Magic", "Adventure"],
  "awards": ["Quill Award for Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror (2007)", "David Gemmell Legend Award (2008)"],
  "imageUrl": "https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472067508m/186074.jpg",
  "format": "Paperback",
  "series": "The Kingkiller Chronicle (1)",
  "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/186074",
  "price": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-04T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Use Cases

📊 Publishing & Market Research

Analyze ratings, review sentiment, and genre trends across thousands of books. Identify emerging genres, track author popularity over time, and benchmark competitor titles.

🤖 AI/ML Training Data

Build high-quality datasets for book recommendation systems, NLP models, sentiment analysis, text classification, and genre prediction. Goodreads data is ideal for:

• Matrix factorization — user-item rating matrices
• Content-based filtering — book metadata & genre features
• NLP training — authentic review text corpora
• Book embeddings — genre-tagged, rated collections

📝 Author & Self-Publishing

Monitor your book's performance, track ratings and reviews, compare against similar titles, and identify keywords for better discoverability.

🏫 Academic Research

Bibliometric studies, network analysis of reading patterns, genre evolution tracking, literary analysis at scale.

📚 Library Science

Enrich library catalog metadata with crowdsourced ratings, shelf/genre tags, series information, and cover images.

Rate Limits & Anti-Bot

Goodreads is a content platform and generally doesn't aggressively block scrapers. However, for reliability at scale, this Actor includes:

• ✅ Headless Playwright browser (full JS rendering)
• ✅ Apify proxy support for IP rotation
• ✅ Request retry logic with exponential backoff
• ✅ Browser stealth techniques (spoofed webdriver, plugins, languages)
• ✅ Polite delays between requests (human-like timing)

Technical Details

Architecture

The scraper uses a two-phase approach:

1. Search phase — Crawls Goodreads search results pages, extracting basic info (title, author, rating, ratings count) and collecting book IDs
2. Detail phase — Visits each book's detail page, extracting rich metadata from both JSON-LD structured data and DOM parsing for comprehensive coverage

RSC Payload Support

Goodreads has been migrating pages to Next.js App Router. The scraper checks for React Server Components (RSC) streaming payloads (self.__next_f.push) first — if found, it extracts structured data directly without DOM parsing. This is:

• Faster (no DOM parsing overhead)
• More resilient (resists layout changes)
• More accurate (same data the app renders)

If RSC data isn't available (e.g. legacy pages), it falls back automatically to HTML/Cheerio parsing with JSON-LD extraction.

Stack

Crawlee (PlaywrightCrawler) · Node.js 20 · Cheerio for HTML fallback · Apify SDK · JSON-LD extraction · RSC payload parsing

Changelog

v1.0 — 2026-07-04

• Initial release
• Book search with full pagination
• Full detail extraction (RSC → JSON-LD → DOM)
• Genre/category extraction
• Award tracking
• Series information
• Three sort options (relevance, rating, date)
• Proxy support with Apify proxy

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Built with 🛠️ by Meester Bot · Not affiliated with Goodreads or Amazon