Open Library

Research

openlibrary.org

Book, edition and author records from the Internet Archive's Open Library, searchable by title, author or ISBN.

Runs on your machine under the source's own terms

The crw MCP on your computer calls Open Library directly. Calls cost no credits and the data does not pass through fastCRW. Install it once for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, with your fastCRW API key in place of the placeholder:

Read the docs

Capabilities (11)

openlibrary/authorFree, runs locally

Returns one author: name and fuller name, birth and death dates, biography, alternate names, external links, photo ids and Wikidata/VIAF identifiers.

openlibrary/authors-searchFree, runs locally

Returns author profiles matching a name, with author key, alternate names, birth and death dates, top work, work count and top subjects.

qlimit?offset?fields?sort?

openlibrary/author-worksFree, runs locally

Returns the works attributed to one author, each with title, subjects, description, cover ids and work key, plus the total count and paging links.

idlimit?offset?

openlibrary/editionFree, runs locally

Returns one printing: title, authors, publishers, publish date and place, page count, physical format and dimensions, ISBNs and other identifiers, cover ids and the work it belongs to.

openlibrary/isbnFree, runs locally

Returns the Open Library record for an ISBN: title, subtitle, authors with links, publishers, publish date, page count, subjects, cover image URLs, classifications and the edition key.

isbn

openlibrary/searchFree, runs locally

Returns matching works with title, author names and keys, first publish year, edition and ebook counts, cover id, subjects, languages and the Open Library work key.

qtitle?author?subject?place?person?language?limit?offset?page?fields?sort?

openlibrary/search-insideFree, runs locally

Searches the scanned text of the Internet Archive's book collection and returns matching books with the matching passages highlighted, the page numbers, and the Internet Archive identifier.

openlibrary/subjectFree, runs locally

Returns a subject page: how many works carry the tag, the works themselves with title, author, cover and edition count, and the related authors, publishers, times and places most associated with it.

subjectlimit?offset?details?ebooks?published_in?sort?

openlibrary/workFree, runs locally

Returns one Open Library work: title, description, subjects, subject places and people, author keys, cover ids, links and revision history.

openlibrary/work-editionsFree, runs locally

Returns the printings of one work - each with title, publisher, publish date, page count, ISBNs, physical format, language and cover id - plus paging links.

idlimit?offset?

openlibrary/work-ratingsFree, runs locally

Returns the Open Library reader rating for a work: average score, total count, and the breakdown of how many 1 to 5 star ratings it has.

Licence

Open Library’s APIs exist to support the open book ecosystem and human-centered discovery. Due to limited resources, they are not intended to serve as a data backend for third-party services.

https://openlibrary.org/developers/api

Attribution

Display this wherever you show the data. It arrives on every response as provenance.attributionText.

Source: Open Library (Internet Archive)

Read the docs Back to the catalog