Free APIKnowledgeNo keyOfficial
Open Library API
Book, author and ISBN data plus cover images for 20M+ titles, no key
Open Library (an Internet Archive project) offers free, keyless web APIs over a catalog of 20M+ books. You can search by title, author or ISBN, fetch work and edition records, and pull cover images by ISBN or Open Library ID. It also has a covers endpoint and bulk data dumps.
Free tier
Free, no key (low-volume; non-profit, asks you to cache and be considerate)Rate limits
Not published; non-profit service requests caching, a descriptive User-Agent and no hammering. Bulk needs use monthly data dumpsAuth
No keyBase URL
https://openlibrary.orgWhat you'd build with it
- Enrich an ISBN lookup with title, author and cover image
- Build a book-search feature or reading-list app
- Resolve a book title to subjects and descriptions for a recommender
- Fetch cover art via covers.openlibrary.org by ISBN
Key endpoints
- GET
/search.json?q={q}Search books and authors, with field filtering - GET
/isbn/{isbn}.jsonEdition record for a given ISBN - GET
/works/{id}.jsonWork-level record (title, subjects, description) - GET
/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:{isbn}&format=json&jscmd=dataRich book data by bibliographic key
Members
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.
Tags
knowledgebooksisbnreferencelibrary