Literal.club Books & Reviews Scraper

Extract public book metadata and visible public review text from Literal.club. Enter book names, ISBNs, author names, Literal.club URLs, or profile handles and get normalized records for books, reviews, authors, and profiles.

This Actor does not use Literal.club's API, does not log in, and does not collect private data.

What You Can Scrape

• Public book metadata: title, subtitle, description, cover, ISBNs, publisher, page count, language, ratings, review counts, and authors
• Public review text rendered on book pages
• Public reviews rendered on profile review pages
• Public author and profile details when available
• Source URLs and timestamps for traceability

Common Use Cases

• Build book review datasets from public Literal.club pages
• Monitor public review snippets for selected books
• Enrich ISBN or title lists with public book metadata
• Collect public reviews from known Literal.club profiles
• Compare public book ratings, review counts, and metadata across a small catalog

Input Examples

Search by book name:

{
  "searchQueries": ["Sapiens"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "maxReviews": 5
}

Search by ISBN:

{
  "isbns": ["9780062316110"],
  "includeReviews": false
}

Use a direct Literal.club book URL:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://literal.club/book/sapiens-bp7kc"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "maxReviews": 10
}

Fast daily smoke-test input:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://literal.club/book/sapiens-bp7kc"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "maxReviews": 1
}

Collect public reviews from a profile:

{
  "profileHandles": ["piet"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "maxReviews": 25
}

Input Fields

• searchQueries: book names or search terms
• isbns: ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 values
• authorNames: author names to search
• startUrls: public Literal.club book, search, author, profile, or profile review URLs
• profileHandles: public Literal.club profile handles
• includeReviews: toggle public review scraping on or off
• maxReviews: maximum review records for the whole run

The Actor keeps advanced settings hidden and uses conservative defaults for concurrency, request delay, memory, and timeouts.

Output

The dataset is normalized. Each saved item has an entityType:

• book
• review
• author
• profile

The Apify Console dataset view includes review text, reviewed book title, reviewer handle, ratings, source URL, and scrape timestamp.

Book item:

{
  "entityType": "book",
  "source": "literal.club",
  "sourceBookId": "ckpptxpp01226151givfzdstoh7",
  "slug": "sapiens-bp7kc",
  "title": "Sapiens",
  "subtitle": "A Brief History of Humankind",
  "coverUrl": "https://assets.literal.club/2/ckpptxpp01226151givfzdstoh7.jpg",
  "isbn10": "0062316117",
  "isbn13": "9780062316110",
  "language": "en",
  "pageCount": 464,
  "publisher": "Harper Perennial",
  "averageRating": 4.34,
  "reviewCount": 1304,
  "authors": [{ "id": "AUTHOR_ID", "name": "Yuval Noah Harari", "slug": "yuval-noah-harari-2guoz" }],
  "bookLevelReviewDiscoveryStatus": "available_in_public_page_and_collected",
  "sourceUrl": "https://literal.club/book/sapiens-bp7kc",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Review item:

{
  "entityType": "review",
  "source": "literal.club",
  "sourceReviewId": "REVIEW_ID",
  "rating": 4,
  "reviewText": "Fascinating read, well written and engaging.",
  "reviewerProfileId": "PROFILE_ID",
  "reviewerHandle": "reader",
  "reviewerName": "Reader Name",
  "bookId": "BOOK_ID",
  "bookSlug": "sapiens-bp7kc",
  "bookTitle": "Sapiens",
  "sourceUrl": "https://literal.club/book/sapiens-bp7kc",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Reviews Coverage

Reviews are returned only when they are visible on public Literal.club pages. The Actor can collect:

• review previews rendered on public book pages
• reviews rendered on public profile review pages

The Actor does not log in and does not call private or public APIs to force complete review pagination. maxReviews is an output cap, not a guarantee that every book has that many public reviews available.

Pricing

Recommended launch pricing: $0.001 per result.

A result is one saved dataset item, such as a book, review, author, or profile. This keeps pricing simple for clients and fits Apify's price-per-dataset-item model.

API Usage

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("thescrapelab/literal-club-book-reviews-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "startUrls": ["https://literal.club/book/sapiens-bp7kc"],
        "includeReviews": True,
        "maxReviews": 1,
    }
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Limitations

• No API calls, login, bearer token, or authenticated data are used.
• Only data visible in public rendered pages or public page HTML is collected.
• Book-name search depends on public search/discovery pages. For best precision, use ISBNs or direct Literal.club book URLs.
• Some books expose metadata but no public review text.
• Public profile review pages depend on profile visibility and page rendering.

Polite Scraping

The Actor uses low concurrency, request delays, bounded retries, and cost-aware memory/timeouts. It does not bypass Cloudflare, login walls, private pages, or anti-bot systems.

Troubleshooting

• Empty results: try a direct Literal.club book URL or ISBN.
• No reviews returned: enable includeReviews, increase maxReviews, or provide a public profile handle with visible reviews.
• Wrong edition: use the exact ISBN or direct Literal.club book URL.
• Slow runs: use direct URLs, reduce the number of book names, or lower maxReviews.