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📚 Open Library Scraper

🚀 Extract book data from Open Library in seconds. Search by title, author, or subject with ebook filtering. No coding, no API keys required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-04-23 · 📊 20 fields · 🔍 5 search types · 📖 Supports books, authors, subjects, lists, and full-text search

Open Library is the Internet Archive's free, open catalog of every book ever published. This scraper connects to Open Library's public API and returns structured book data including titles, authors, ISBNs, publishers, cover images, ratings, descriptions, page counts, and download links. It supports 5 search types (Books, Authors, Search Inside, Subjects, and Lists), handles pagination automatically, and exports data as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Whether you are building a book recommendation engine, tracking ISBN availability, or conducting bibliographic research, this actor delivers structured data for up to 1,000,000 records per run for paid users. Each result includes cover images, publication dates, publisher names, available formats (PDF, EPUB, AZW3), community ratings, edition counts, and subject classifications. No manual searching, copying, or format conversion needed.

📋 What the Open Library Scraper does

• 🔍 Keyword search across books, authors, subjects, lists, and full-text content
• 📖 Ebook filtering to show only books available as free digital downloads
• 🖼️ Cover image extraction with URLs for small, medium, and large sizes
• 📊 Edition and rating data including community ratings and total edition counts
• 📥 Download link collection for PDF, EPUB, and AZW3 formats when available
• 🌐 Direct URL support to scrape any Open Library search results page

The scraper sends your query to Open Library's public API, retrieves matching records, and extracts full metadata for each item. For book searches, it collects titles, authors, ISBNs, publishers, page counts, descriptions, cover images, ratings, available formats, and download links. For author searches, it returns author profiles with their works. Every record is timestamped and includes a direct link to the Open Library entry.

💡 Why it matters: Open Library contains metadata for millions of books, but browsing and exporting data manually is tedious. This scraper automates collection and delivers clean, structured data ready for databases, spreadsheets, or applications.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon...

⚙️ Input

Example 1: Basic book search

{
"searchQuery":"Space",
"searchType":"books",
"maxItems":10
}

Example 2: Ebook-only author search

{
"searchQuery":"Isaac Asimov",
"searchType":"books",
"ebooksOnly":true,
"maxItems":50
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Use either a Start URL or search filters, not both. If you provide a Start URL, search filters are ignored. The ebooks-only filter only works with the "books" search type.

📊 Output

🧾 Schema

📦 Sample records

✨ Why choose this Actor

📊 Collect up to 1,000,000 book records per run with cover images, ISBNs, download links, and ratings.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Get structured book data at scale without manual browsing or copy-pasting.

🚀 How to use

1. Create an Apify account - Sign up free with $5 credit
2. Open the Open Library Scraper - Navigate to the actor page on Apify
3. Enter your search query - Type a title, author name, or subject
4. Select search type and filters - Choose Books, Authors, Subjects, etc. and enable ebook filtering if needed
5. Click Start - The actor collects matching records and delivers structured data

⏱️ A typical run with 10 books completes in under 30 seconds.

💼 Business use cases

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔌 Automating Open Library Scraper

Integrate the Open Library Scraper into your workflow using the Apify API or client libraries.

Node.js:

import{ ApifyClient }from'apify-client';
const client =newApifyClient({token:'YOUR_API_TOKEN'});
const run =await client.actor("parseforge/open-library-scraper").call({
searchQuery:"Space",
searchType:"books",
maxItems:50
});
const{ items }=await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("parseforge/open-library-scraper").call(run_input={
"searchQuery":"Space",
"searchType":"books",
"maxItems":50
})
items =list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())
print(items)

• 📖 Apify API reference
• 🐍 Python client docs
• 📦 Node.js client docs

Schedules: Set up recurring runs to track new book additions, monitor ebook availability, or build growing datasets of book metadata. Configure daily, weekly, or monthly schedules from the Apify Console.

🔌 Integrate with any app

• 🔗 Make (Integromat) - Connect book data to Google Sheets, Airtable, or any of 1,500+ apps
• 🔗 Zapier - Trigger workflows when new book records are collected
• 🔗 Slack - Get notified when a book data run completes
• 🔗 Airbyte - Stream book metadata into your data warehouse
• 🔗 GitHub - Store book datasets in repositories for version control
• 🔗 Google Drive - Automatically save CSV exports to shared folders

🔗 Recommended Actors

💡 Pro Tip: Combine the Open Library Scraper with the Crossref Scraper to match book ISBNs with DOI metadata and citation counts.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form and we will get back to you within 24 hours. We are happy to help with custom setups, integrations, or feature requests.

Disclaimer: This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Open Library or the Internet Archive. It accesses publicly available data through Open Library's public API. Use responsibly and in accordance with applicable terms of service.