Open Library Book Research

Live

Find books and compare their cataloged editions.

Discover books in Open Library, inspect work identities and compare edition-specific publishers, publication dates, languages and ISBNs. Bounded community-edited catalog metadata supports human-directed reading and bibliography research with source links.

Connect this tool ↗Tool reference

Connect / 4 tools

Server URL

streamable http

https://toolcargo.com/mcp/open-library

Claude Code

terminal

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user toolcargo-open-library https://toolcargo.com/mcp/open-library \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Create a key in your dashboard. Other clients: setup guides.

What it helps you do

Book discovery
Work and edition disambiguation
Source-linked bibliographic comparison

Built for: Readers, librarians and research agents identifying books and editions.

Example requests

Compare editions before citing a book

“Find Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen in Open Library. Inspect the exact work, list up to five editions and inspect one edition. Keep the search first publication year, work first publication date and edition publication date separate; report conflicting or missing metadata and exact source IDs. Do not request full text.”

A bibliographic comparison that identifies the work and selected edition without claiming access or copyright permission.

Explore useful agent workflows ↗

Tools

Tool	What it does	Access
`ol_search_books` Find book works	Human-directed Open Library catalog discovery by plain query, title and/or author. Returns at most 10 work records with distinct indexed first-publication year and edition count. Explicit offset pages only; counts may be approximate. No reader, full text or availability lookup. One shared-plan call.	Read-only
`ol_work_details` Inspect a book work	Inspect one exact OL…W work ID, title, selected subjects, author IDs and catalog first_publish_date. A work groups editions; dates can disagree with the search index. No description, excerpt or linked fetch. One shared-plan call.	Read-only
`ol_work_editions` Compare editions of a work	Read one explicit page of at most 10 editions for an exact OL…W work. Verify each edition's work relationship and compare bounded publisher, date, language and ISBN catalog fields. Offset 0–1000; no crawling or automatic pagination. One shared-plan call.	Read-only
`ol_edition_details` Inspect a book edition	Read bibliographic metadata for one exact OL…M edition ID. Return work/author IDs, publication date, publishers, languages, ISBNs and physical format where recorded. These describe an edition, not all versions. No files, covers, prose or reader access. One shared-plan call.	Read-only

Requirements

• A ToolCargo account with Site Audit activated (free). No Open Library credentials or paid provider.

Limitations

• For human-directed book discovery and bibliographic research only. No bulk harvesting, automated recurring scans or high-traffic backend use.
• Search uses plain 2–200 character query/title/author fields; Solr operators are treated as literal text. Explicit pages return at most 10 records with offset 0–1000. No complete-catalog guarantee.
• Work IDs end W and edition IDs end M. Works group editions; dates, titles and publisher metadata may be incomplete or disagree. Catalog presence does not prove availability, full-text access or reuse permission.
• Only selected bounded metadata is returned, with missing/truncation signals. No book descriptions, excerpts, abstracts, covers, reader pages, files, contact details or provider links followed.
• Provider requests are paced, identified and never retried. Instance-local projected responses may be cached for five minutes (50 entries, at most 50 KB each); fetchedAt/cacheHit expose freshness. Each successful cached or fresh operation still uses one shared-plan call.

Supported clients

“Tested” means we connected that client to this endpoint and ran a tool call ourselves. Recorded client-specific tests currently cover Site Audit. Other connectors use the documented setup until tested in that client.

Claude Code	API key header	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.
Claude (claude.ai)	OAuth sign-in	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.
Cursor	API key header	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.
VS Code (Copilot agent mode)	API key header	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.
ChatGPT (developer mode)	OAuth sign-in	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.
MCP Inspector	API key header	Documented, not yet tested	This endpoint has not yet been tested in this client. See the setup guide.

Practical workflows

Find books and compare editions with MCP

Pricing

Included with Site Audit. Each successful search page, work, edition page or edition lookup uses one shared-plan call.

Free

Try hosted tools with a shared monthly allowance.

50 shared calls/month

Pro

$12/mo

Proposed larger shared allowance; see checkout status on the pricing page.

2,000 shared calls/month

Proposed test price. See the pricing page for checkout status.

Full pricing and billing details