Gutenberg Book Catalog
Pricing
from $10.00 / 1,000 results
Gutenberg Book Catalog
Project Gutenberg Book Catalog
What Does Project Gutenberg Book Catalog Do?
Project Gutenberg Book Catalog is an Apify actor that searches the Project Gutenberg digital library and extracts structured book data. With over 70,000 free eBooks in the public domain, Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and largest collections of free digital literature. This scraper returns book titles, authors, languages, download counts, subjects, and direct links to each book.
Why Use This Gutenberg Book Scraper?
Project Gutenberg offers an invaluable collection of classic literature, historical texts, and reference materials, all completely free. This scraper makes it easy to search the catalog programmatically, build reading lists, perform literary analysis, create content databases, or develop educational applications. Instead of manually browsing and recording data, get a clean structured dataset instantly.
How to Search Project Gutenberg Books
- Enter your search query (book title, author name, or keyword).
- Set the maximum number of books to return.
- Run the actor to get a structured dataset with book metadata.
The actor first searches Project Gutenberg's catalog, then visits each individual book page to extract detailed metadata including subjects, download counts, and language information.
Input Parameters
| Parameter | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
query | string | Book title or author to search for | "sherlock holmes" |
maxResults | integer | Maximum books to return | 25 |
Output Data
Each book record includes:
- title - Book title
- author - Author name
- language - Language of the text
- downloads - Number of downloads on Gutenberg
- bookUrl - Direct URL to the book page
- subjects - Subject/genre tags
- scrapedAt - Timestamp of the scrape
Cost of Usage
Very affordable for literary research:
- Per result: $0.01
- Per 1,000 results: $10
- Actor start cost: $0.005
A search returning 25 books costs well under a cent in compute resources.
Tips and Best Practices
- Search by author name to find all works by a specific author (e.g., "Mark Twain").
- Use specific titles for precise results (e.g., "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn").
- Combine with text extraction tools to build full-text datasets of public domain literature.
- The download count indicates popularity and can help prioritize which books to use.
- Schedule periodic runs to track newly added books on Gutenberg.
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