Books and libraries · by Internet Archive

Open Library

An open, editable catalog of books, editions and authors run by the Internet Archive, with JSON APIs for search, covers and records, plus full monthly data dumps.

Almost every page has a machine-readable twin: add .json to a work or author URL and you get the structured record behind it.

API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions

Open openlibrary.org ↗ agent.md

For your project

Official API: Official API 1 request per second without identification; 3 requests per second with a User-Agent containing app name and contact email. Not for bulk download or high-traffic commercial backends.
“Open Library provides APIs in JSON, YAML and RDF/XML formats to support public-good, open, human-centered book discovery and lookup services.” openlibrary.org/developers/api
Key: Not needed
“Default (non-identified requests): 1 request per second Identified requests (with User-Agent and email ): 3 requests per second” openlibrary.org/developers/api
Formats: JSON, YAML, RDF, XML
Data download: Yes, editions dump (~ 9.2G), works dump (~ 2.9G), authors dump (~ 0.5G), all types dump (~ 12.4G), complete dump (~ 29.6G) tsv, json
“Open Library provides dumps of all its data, generated every month.” openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
License: No new rights asserted by the Internet Archive (Open Library licensing note) Catalog metadata in the Open Library database; some contributions may carry existing rights; API use limited to human-centered, non-bulk use
Commercial use: Commercial use with conditions
“Use Open Library as a backend for high-traffic commercial services” openlibrary.org/developers/api
Credit: Not stated
Embedding: Embedding unclear
Using the website: Free

Read on Open Library's own pages on Oct 23, 2026 · license or terms · API docs. Check the license page before you ship.

For your agent

A request your code or agent can make with no key:

https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=the+lord+of+the+rings&limit=5

Append .json to any /works/, /books/ or /authors/ URL; batch lookups through search.json; set a User-Agent with app name and contact email for 3 req/s; use the monthly dumps for anything bulk.
Stay under 1 req/s (3 req/s with a User-Agent naming your app and contact email); cache responses.
Do not scrape HTML or bulk-download via the API; use the monthly dumps.
Do not use the API as the backend of a high-traffic commercial service.

Paste into your agent: Read https://agentgid.com/resources/open-library/agent.md before using Open Library.

What you can build

A reading list app with real coversSearch any book by title or ISBN, add it to a list and show its cover and author, from Open Library's free APIs.

A reading-list or book-club app that looks up titles, authors and covers on demand
An ISBN scanner that fills in book details for a home or school library
A local book-metadata search engine loaded from the monthly dumps into DuckDB or PostgreSQL

More in Books and libraries

All 7 →

Project Gutenberg It is one of the largest clean, proofread corpora of classic literature, and the whole catalog and text set can be downloaded in bulk. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Internet Archive Behind every item is a folder of original files and metadata you can fetch directly, from old radio shows to scanned books and forgotten home movies. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Library of Congress Any search page on loc.gov can be turned into structured data, so whole collections of historic photos or maps become something you can query and plot. API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions Europeana One query can pull paintings, manuscripts, newspapers and sound recordings from institutions all over Europe, filtered to items that are free to reuse. APIDownloadCommercial: conditions Digital Public Library of America It stitches together small local archives and big institutions, so one search can surface a town historical society's photos next to national collections. License unclear archive.today It keeps frozen, script-free copies of pages that later change or vanish, so you can see what a page said on a given day. License unclear

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