Isbndb Book Scraper

README: Book Data Scraper

What does this Actor do?

This Apify Actor is designed to scrape book data from the isbndb.com website. It allows you to search for books based on various criteria such as query, author, title, ISBN, language, edition and publication year. It then extracts key information about each book, including:

• Title: The title of the book.
• Authors: A list of the book's authors.
• ISBN: The book's ISBN (if available).
• Language: The language of the book.
• Edition: The edition of the book.
• Published: The publication date of the book.
• Cover: URL of the book's cover image.

The actor efficiently navigates through multiple pages of results, gathering data from each page and saving it as an output dataset.

Why is this Actor useful?

This Actor is useful for:

• Researchers: Quickly gathering book data for research purposes, such as bibliographic studies.
• Bookstores: Compiling lists of books with detailed information for inventory or competitive analysis.
• Libraries: Creating catalogs of books with relevant metadata.
• Data enthusiasts: Building datasets of book information for personal projects.
• Anyone seeking book information: It allows users to quickly get details on any book.

How to get started with this Actor

To use this Actor, you'll need the following input parameters:

• query (Required): The search term for books.
• totalPages (Required): The number of result pages to scrape.
• column (Optional): The column to search for (e.g., 'title', 'author').
• edition (Optional): Filter results by edition.
• year (Optional): Filter results by publication year.
• language (Optional): Filter results by language.

Example Input

1{
2    "query": "The Lord of the Rings",
3    "totalPages": 3,
4    "column": "title",
5    "language": "en",
6}

How to use the Actor

1. Create an Apify Account: If you don't have one, sign up for free on the Apify platform.
2. Create a new task: Select the 'Create new' button and then select the actor you are using from the marketplace.
3. Set the input: Set the input parameters according to your needs.
4. Run the Actor: Click on the "Start" button, or on "Save & Run" to save your configuration and run it at the same time.
5. View the Results: Once the run is completed, you can view the extracted data in the "Dataset" tab. The data is available in JSON format.

Input Parameters details

• query: This is the main search term. The actor will perform the search using this term and return the books that match.
• totalPages: This parameter sets how many pages of results the actor will navigate. Each page usually has multiple book entries, so this determines the overall scope of the data to gather.
• column: This parameter specifies what aspect of the book the actor should use for the search. For example, searching by 'title' will return books that have the query in their title, searching by 'author' will return books that are written by the specified author.
• edition: If you are looking for a specific edition of the book, then this parameter can be used.
• year: This parameter allows filtering results to only return the books published in a certain year.
• language: You can filter results by specifying the language of the books you are looking for.

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset containing the scraped book information in JSON format. Each item in the dataset will be a JSON object representing a single book, with the following properties:

1{
2        "title": "The Fellowship of the Ring",
3        "authors": ["J.R.R. Tolkien"],
4        "isbn": "0618260262",
5        "language": "English",
6        "published": "2003-01-02",
7        "edition": "2",
8        "cover": "/images/book/m/0618260262.jpg"
9    }

Tips

• For broader searches, start with a generic query and fewer filters.
• Adjust the totalPages parameter according to the number of results needed.
• Be patient with large amounts of data to be scraped. It might take a while to execute the scraping logic.