OpenLibrary Book Scraper

Search millions of books on OpenLibrary (Internet Archive) by keyword, author, subject or ISBN and get back clean, structured JSON — title, authors, publishers, first publish year, subjects, languages, edition count, ISBNs, page count, ratings and a cover image URL. Mix and match search types in a single run and collect up to 1,000 books per query. No account, no API key. Great for catalog building, book discovery apps, research and metadata enrichment.

Features

• 🔎 Four ways to search — combine searchTerms (keyword), authors, subjects and isbns in one run; every query is labeled in the output.
• 🧹 Automatic dedup — books appearing across multiple queries are deduplicated by their OpenLibrary work key.
• ↕️ Sort control — order results by relevance, new, old, rating or editions.
• 🏷️ ISBN lookups — resolve specific editions by ISBN, with digits normalized automatically.
• ⭐ Ratings & reach — average rating, rating count, edition count and median page count on every record.
• 🖼️ Cover images — a ready-to-use large cover URL plus full-text availability flag.
• 📈 Scales cleanly — up to 1,000 books per query with automatic pagination and retries.

What you get

Each dataset row is one book:

{
  "query": "machine learning",
  "title": "Deep Learning",
  "subtitle": "Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning",
  "authors": ["Ian Goodfellow", "Yoshua Bengio", "Aaron Courville"],
  "firstPublishYear": 2016,
  "publishers": ["MIT Press"],
  "subjects": ["Machine learning", "Neural networks (Computer science)"],
  "languages": ["eng"],
  "editionCount": 7,
  "isbn": "9780262035613",
  "isbns": ["9780262035613", "0262035618"],
  "pages": 775,
  "ratingAverage": 4.32,
  "ratingCount": 210,
  "hasFulltext": true,
  "coverUrl": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/8231856-L.jpg",
  "olKey": "/works/OL17860744W",
  "url": "https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17860744W"
}

Output schema

Input

{
  "searchTerms": ["machine learning"],
  "authors": ["J.R.R. Tolkien"],
  "subjects": ["fantasy"],
  "isbns": ["9780262035613"],
  "sort": "relevance",
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 50
}

Use cases

• Build or enrich a book catalog with clean metadata, ISBNs and cover images.
• Power a book-discovery or recommendation feature filtered by subject and rating.
• Compile an author's bibliography with edition counts and publish years.
• Resolve a list of ISBNs into full structured records for a library or retail dataset.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: you're billed a small amount per run and per item scraped — you only pay for what you get. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. This Actor uses the public OpenLibrary search API — no account, login or API key required.

How many books can I scrape per run? Up to 1,000 books per query via maxResultsPerQuery, and you can combine keyword, author, subject and ISBN queries in one run, so a single run can return several thousand books (deduped by OpenLibrary work key).

Is scraping OpenLibrary legal? Yes. OpenLibrary (a project of the Internet Archive) openly publishes its catalog through a public search API, and this Actor reads only those openly available records and returns them as-is.

What format is the output? Structured JSON — one record per book — exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel. Each record includes title, authors, publishers, first publish year, subjects, languages, edition count, ISBNs, page count, ratings and a cover image URL.

Can I search by author, subject or ISBN? Yes. Combine searchTerms (keyword), authors, subjects and isbns in a single run, and order results with sort by relevance, new, old, rating or editions.

Can I connect this to other apps? The OpenLibrary Book Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Building a catalog or metadata dataset? These other hipersoft scrapers may be useful alongside this one:

• OpenAlex Scraper — 250M+ scholarly works with citations, authors and abstracts
• Crossref Scraper — DOIs, citation counts and metadata from 150M+ works
• Wikipedia Scraper — structured article content and metadata from Wikipedia
• arXiv Papers Scraper — preprints with full abstracts and PDF links

Notes

This Actor uses the public OpenLibrary search API and returns that catalog's own data as-is, over openly available records with no login required. It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OpenLibrary or the Internet Archive.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.