Open Library Book Intelligence

Extract book and author metadata from Open Library's catalog of over 20 million records.

Overview

This actor is a developer tool for programmatically querying Open Library's database. It returns structured JSON data for books and authors, useful for enriching applications, conducting research, or analyzing publishing data.

Key Features

• Search Books: Find books by title, author, subject, or keywords.
• ISBN Lookup: Retrieve detailed book information using ISBN-10 or ISBN-13.
• Browse by Subject: Explore books within specific genres or topics.
• Author Search: Get author biographies, works, and related metadata.
• Cost-Effective: Priced at $0.001 per book or author record retrieved (PAY_PER_RESULT).

How to Use

Configure the actor run with one of the following input methods:
* Search Query: A string for general book searches (e.g., "machine learning").
* ISBN: A single ISBN for direct book lookup.
* Subject: A predefined subject key to browse (e.g., science_fiction).
* Author Name: A string to search for authors.

The actor will process the input and return the corresponding book or author records.

Input / Output

Input: Choose one method per run: a search query, an ISBN, a subject key, or an author name.

Output (Book Record):
Each book result includes core metadata fields. Here's a typical JSON structure:

{
  "title": "Book Title",
  "subtitle": "Subtitle if applicable",
  "authors": ["Author One", "Author Two"],
  "first_publish_year": 2001,
  "edition_count": 5,
  "isbn": ["1234567890", "123-4567890123"],
  "languages": ["eng"],
  "subjects": ["Subject A", "Subject B"],
  "publishers": ["Publisher Name"],
  "number_of_pages_median": 320,
  "cover_url": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/12345-M.jpg",
  "ratings_average": 4.1,
  "ratings_count": 150,
  "ebook_access": "borrowable",
  "has_fulltext": true,
  "public_scan": false
}

Output (Author Record):
Each author result includes:
* name, alternate_names
* birth_date, death_date
* bio (biography text)
* work_count
* top_subjects
* photo_url

Use Cases

• Publishers & Bookstores: For market research and inventory enrichment.
• Libraries & Education: To enhance catalogs or discover course materials.
• Researchers: For literary analysis and bibliometrics.
• Developers: To build book recommendation systems or content apps.
• Content Creators: For research and fact-checking.

Popular Subject Keys

You can browse using these common subject keys: science_fiction, mystery, romance, fantasy, biography, history, self-help, business, technology, cooking.