Open Library API

About

Open Library offers free public APIs for book search, ISBN and edition lookup, authors, subjects and covers, returning JSON. No key is needed; requests are limited to 1 per second, or 3 per second with an identifying User-Agent. Monthly data dumps cover bulk needs.

What you can do with it

• Look up a book's title, authors and publisher from its ISBN
• Search books by title or author and read edition data
• Fetch cover images for a book catalogue

Get started

1. Send a User-Agent with your app name and contact email
2. Stay within 1 request per second, or 3 when identified

Example

curl -H "User-Agent: my-app/1.0 (you@yourdomain.com)" \
  "https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9780140328721.json"

Details

Hosting

Hosted service

Available in

Worldwide

MCP server

None