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from $7.50 / 1,000 results
OpenStax Open Textbooks Scraper
Browse OpenStax open license textbooks by subject or free text query. Each record returns title, subject, edition, authors, license, isbn, pages, language, available reading formats, and url. Useful for OER catalogs, curriculum planning, and edtech content discovery.
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📚 OpenStax Textbooks Scraper
🚀 Export OpenStax records in seconds. Pipe results straight into your spreadsheet, dashboard, or data warehouse.
🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 10 fields per record · Public OpenStax data · Real-time updates
The OpenStax Textbooks Scraper turns the public OpenStax CMS endpoint into a clean structured dataset of open educational textbooks. Every record carries title, subject, edition, authors, license, ISBN, page count, language, and direct download links.
| 🎯 Target Audience | 💡 Primary Use Cases |
|---|---|
| 🎓 Students | Find free textbooks for class. |
| 👩🏫 Educators | Build reading lists from open content. |
| 📚 Librarians | Track new OpenStax releases. |
| 🤖 EdTech builders | Power discovery features with open data. |
📋 What the OpenStax Textbooks Scraper does
- Fetches the public OpenStax feed at
https://openstax.org/apps/cms/api/v2/pages/. - Parses the response and flattens each record into one structured row.
- Casts numeric values to numbers, dates to ISO strings.
- Surfaces upstream errors as a clean
errorrecord instead of crashing. - Pushes everything to the dataset, ready for instant download.
💡 Why it matters: OpenStax publishes the data, but the raw response is awkward to work with. This actor normalizes everything into a flat schema that drops straight into pandas, BigQuery, or a Google Sheet.
🎬 Full Demo
🚧 Coming soon.
⚙️ Input
See the Input tab on the Apify console for the full list of supported filters. Every filter is optional. maxItems controls how many records are returned.
Example
⚠️ Good to Know. Free users are capped at 10 records per run as a preview. Paid users can pull up to 1,000,000 records.
📊 Output
Each record is a flat object. The error field is always last.
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
📚 title | string | Textbook title. |
🏷️ subject | string | Subject area. |
📖 edition | string | Edition label. |
✍️ authors | array | List of author names. |
⚖️ license | string | Creative Commons license. |
🔢 isbn | string | ISBN identifier if available. |
📄 pages | number | Page count. |
🗣️ language | string | Primary language. |
📥 downloadFormats | array | Available download formats. |
🔗 url | string | Public OpenStax URL. |
🕒 scrapedAt | string | When this row was fetched. |
❌ error | string | Set if the upstream response was an error. |
✨ Why choose this Actor
| 🆓 | Works with the free Apify plan (10-record preview). | | 🧹 | Clean snake_case keys ready for BI tools. | | 🔢 | Auto-casts numeric and date fields. | | 🛟 | Surfaces upstream errors as a clean record. | | 💾 | Push to dataset and download in any supported format. |
📈 How it compares to alternatives
| Approach | Setup time | Clean keys | Numeric casting | Error handling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roll your own fetch | 30 min + | No | No | No |
| This Actor | 5 sec, no install | Yes | Yes | Yes |
🚀 How to use
- Click Try for free.
- Adjust the input filters or leave defaults.
- Click Start. Within seconds, your dataset is ready.
💼 Business use cases
🎓 Course planning. Pull every OpenStax title in a subject and pick the right edition for your syllabus.
📚 Library catalogs. Sync OpenStax metadata into your library system on a schedule.
🤖 EdTech discovery. Power search and recommendation features in your learning app.
🌍 Translation projects. Identify titles by language to coordinate volunteer translation efforts.
🔌 Automating OpenStax Textbooks Scraper
- Make / Zapier. Trigger this actor on a schedule, push results to Airtable, Slack, or your CRM.
- Cron schedule. Apify's native scheduler runs this on whatever cadence you need.
- Webhooks. Get a POST to your endpoint the moment a run finishes.
- Pipe to your warehouse. Native Apify integrations move datasets straight into BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres.
🌟 Beyond business use cases
🎓 Education. Use real public data for classroom projects.
🧪 Personal research. Build your own dashboards and notebooks.
🤝 Non-profit & open data. Power public dashboards without writing client code.
🧰 Tinkering & prototyping. Spin up a fresh data feed in seconds.
🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper
Pop this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your specific workflow to the actor's inputs.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
❓ Is the data free to use? OpenStax publishes everything under Creative Commons licenses. Check each record's license field for specifics.
❓ How fresh is the data? Pulled live from the OpenStax CMS API on every run.
❓ Can I filter by subject? Yes, pick a subject from the dropdown.
❓ Are all formats listed? Yes. The downloadFormats array surfaces every download option.
❓ Does this need an API key? No. The OpenStax API is fully public.
❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes, via Apify's native scheduler or Make / Zapier.
❓ Will the schema change? The core fields are stable.
❓ Is this scraping or API? API. OpenStax exposes a public CMS endpoint.
❓ What if a field is null? Some optional fields (ISBN, pages) are only set when OpenStax publishes them.
❓ What output format can I download? Every Apify-supported export format is available straight from the dataset UI.
🔌 Integrate with any app
Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint.
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💡 Pro Tip. Browse the complete ParseForge collection for 900+ production-grade scrapers across business intelligence, real estate, e-commerce, sports, finance, and public records.
Disclaimer. This actor scrapes only publicly available data. ParseForge is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any third-party services referenced. Users are responsible for complying with the target site's terms of service and applicable law. Create a free account w/ $5 credit.
