Free Book and Text Data APIs: Gutenberg, Open Library, Wikipedia
Free books, book metadata and encyclopedic text you can search, download or feed to an AI assistant, with the license of each.
For your agent: agent.md · MCP find_resources("books and texts")
Open sources
API, key and license read on each source's own pages
| Source | API | Key | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Gutenberg A volunteer-built library of free eBooks, mostly older works out of US copyright, offered as HTML, EPUB, Kindle and plain text, with full catalog dumps in RDF and CSV. |
Official API · Free | No | Commercial use with conditions |
| 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. |
Official API | No | Commercial use with conditions |
| Internet Archive A non-profit digital library of uploaded books, films, audio, software and web snapshots, with open APIs for search, item metadata and file download. |
Official API | No | Commercial use with conditions |
| Wikipedia The free encyclopedia plus a family of public APIs (Action API, REST API, pageviews, live edit stream) and monthly full database dumps of every Wikimedia wiki. |
Official API · Free | No | Commercial use with conditions |
| Europeana A single search portal and set of APIs over records from European museums, libraries and archives, with CC0 metadata and per-item rights labels for the linked images, texts, audio and video. |
Official API | Yes | Commercial use with conditions |
Libraries
From Tools
Build ideas
Ask questions of a classic bookA chat assistant that answers questions about a public-domain novel and quotes the passage it used.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.Ambient sound from live Wikipedia editsA web page that plays a soft note for every Wikipedia edit happening now, like Listen to Wikipedia, built on the public edit stream.