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Open Library

Books, authors and covers from the Internet Archive.

📚 Open DataHEALTHYchecked 2h ago
AUTH NONECORS ✓AGENT ✓HTTPS ✓COMMERCIAL ?

Open Library exposes bibliographic data for tens of millions of books — search, works, editions, covers — maintained by the Internet Archive. Great for reading apps and coursework. Bulk users should download the data dumps instead of crawling the API.

73HOW IT'S SCORED ⓘ
▶ Run liveDocs ↗
Status badge · for your READMEshipapis health badge: 73 · healthy
Uptime history
88.2%90 days
81.7%30 days
1629P50 · ms
4878P95 · ms
operationalpartialdownno data
Response time · last 48 checks
Fastest 546 ms, slowest 4678 ms, most recent 1034 ms.
Live response samplecaptured by our last successful check
GET https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=things+fall+apart&limit=1

{
  "numFound": 214,
  "docs": [
    {
      "title": "Things Fall Apart",
      "author_name": [
        "Chinua Achebe"
      ],
      "first_publish_year": 1958
    }
  ]
}
Call itcurl · fetch · python
curl "https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=things+fall+apart&limit=1"
const res = await fetch("https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=things+fall+apart&limit=1");
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);
import requests

res = requests.get("https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=things+fall+apart&limit=1")
print(res.json())
Endpoints · 4HealthyFULL DOCS ↗
Monitored path responding — GET /search.json?q=python&limit=31629 mschecked 2h ago
GET/search.json?q=python&limit=3PROBED

Full-text book search.

GET/works/OL45804W.json

Work metadata by Open Library work ID.

GET/authors/OL23919A.json

Author record by OLID.

GET/subjects/science.json?limit=5

Books tagged with a subject.

Machine-readable spec

We probe a documented GET and expect 2xx JSON — full uptime and health score. Export includes every documented route below.

Response-shape history

Stable. No schema drift observed since monitoring began — the response shape has not changed under our checks.

Open Library: common questions

Is Open Library free to use?

Yes — Open Library is a free open data API. Free tier: Unlimited within courtesy limits. Whether the free tier allows commercial use is unclear — check the provider docs.

Does Open Library need an API key?

No — Open Library needs no API key or signup. You can call it straight away; rate limits still apply (Soft — identified UA appreciated).

Can I call Open Library from the browser?

Yes — Open Library returns CORS headers over HTTPS, so front-end code can fetch it directly with no backend proxy. Use the fetch snippet on this page, or hit "Run live" to try it now.

Is Open Library up right now?

As of our last scheduled check, Open Library is healthy with 88.2% uptime over 90 days and a 1629 ms median response. We re-probe it every sweep — the status badge and uptime chart above always show the latest.