Goodreads Scraper

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An Apify Actor that scrapes book data from Goodreads shelf/genre pages. Built with Crawlee CheerioCrawler for fast, efficient HTML parsing.

What it does

This scraper extracts book data from Goodreads shelf pages (e.g., goodreads.com/shelf/show/science-fiction). Each shelf page lists 50 popular books in that genre, ranked by how many users shelved them.

Two modes of operation

1. Shelf mode (default): Scrapes book listings from shelf pages. Fast -- extracts title, author, rating, rating count, published year, shelf count, and cover image directly from the listing.

2. Detail mode (scrapeDetails: true): Also visits each book's individual page to extract rich structured data from Goodreads' JSON-LD schema, including full description, genres, page count, ISBN, book format, language, awards, and review count.

Input

Popular shelf names

science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, non-fiction, thriller, horror, historical-fiction, young-adult, classics, biography, self-help, poetry, graphic-novels, philosophy, true-crime, dystopian, adventure, humor, manga

Output

Shelf mode fields

Additional detail mode fields

Example usage

Basic: Top science fiction books

{
"searchQueries":["science-fiction"],
"maxBooks":50
}

Multiple genres with details

{
"searchQueries":["fantasy","mystery","romance"],
"maxBooks":100,
"scrapeDetails":true
}

Large-scale with proxy

{
"searchQueries":["science-fiction","fantasy","thriller","horror"],
"maxBooks":500,
"scrapeDetails":true,
"proxyConfiguration":{
"useApifyProxy":true
}
}

Example output

{
"title":"Dune (Dune, #1)",
"author":"Frank Herbert",
"authorUrl":"https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/58.Frank_Herbert",
"rating":4.29,
"ratingCount":1645579,
"publishedYear":1965,
"shelfCount":21643,
"coverImage":"https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555447414l/44767458._SX318_.jpg",
"bookId":"44767458",
"url":"https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767458-dune",
"searchQuery":"science-fiction",
"scrapedAt":"2026-03-17T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Technical notes

• Uses CheerioCrawler (HTTP-only, no browser) for maximum speed
• Shelf pages (/shelf/show/) and book pages (/book/show/) are allowed by Goodreads robots.txt
• Rate-limited to avoid overloading servers (30-40 requests/minute)
• Shelf pages return 50 books per page, paginated with ?page=N
• Detail pages use Goodreads' JSON-LD @type: Book structured data for reliable extraction
• No Cloudflare or CAPTCHA protection on these endpoints

Running locally

$apify run --purge

Make sure to set your input in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json.

Deploy to Apify

apify login
apify push

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