Project Gutenberg Books Scraper

hipersoft/gutenberg-books-scraper

Search and export Project Gutenberg's public-domain book catalog in bulk: title, authors with birth/death years, subjects, bookshelves, languages, download count and download links for plain-text and EPUB. Clean structured JSON, CSV or Excel.

Run this scraper →See the API call

Total users

Monthly users

Total runs

Per book scraped

$0.001

Last rebuilt

Oct 23, 2026

Overview

Search and export Project Gutenberg's public-domain book catalog as clean, structured JSON, CSV or Excel: title, authors (with birth/death years), subjects, bookshelves, languages, download count and ready-to-use download links for plain-text and EPUB. Search by keyword, filter by topic, language and author era, and pull one tidy record per book — thousands of free classics in a single run.

What does Project Gutenberg Books Scraper do?

This Project Gutenberg scraper turns the world's largest library of free, public-domain ebooks into a structured dataset. Give it a search query (like sherlock holmes), or browse the whole catalog and narrow it down by topic, language and author era, then choose how the results are ordered — most popular first, or by catalog ID. For every matching book you get the headline metadata plus direct download links, so you can build reading lists, feed text-analysis pipelines, or archive classics in bulk.

What data can you scrape from Project Gutenberg?

Data point	Description
`id`	Project Gutenberg book ID.
`title`	Book title.
`authors`	Author list — each with `name`, `birthYear` and `deathYear`.
`translators`	Translators, when credited (same shape as authors).
`subjects`	Library-of-Congress style subject headings.
`bookshelves`	Curated Project Gutenberg bookshelf categories.
`languages`	Two-letter language codes the book is available in.
`copyright`	Whether the book is under copyright (usually `false`).
`mediaType`	Media type (e.g. `Text`).
`downloadCount`	How many times the book has been downloaded.
`formats`	Map of MIME type → download URL (HTML, EPUB, Kindle, plain-text and more).
`textUrl`	Direct plain-text download link, when available.
`epubUrl`	Direct EPUB download link, when available.
`url`	Project Gutenberg reading page for the book.

Use cases

Reading & research datasets — assemble a themed corpus of classics for analysis or search.
Text mining & NLP — feed full-text book links into notebooks, models or RAG apps.
Digital libraries — build or enrich a catalog with titles, authors, subjects and covers.
Bulk downloads — grab plain-text and EPUB links for offline reading collections.
Discovery — surface the most popular public-domain books by topic, language or author era.

How to scrape Project Gutenberg data

Add Project Gutenberg Books Scraper to your Apify account and open its input.
Enter a search query (e.g. sherlock holmes), or leave it empty to browse everything.
Optionally set a topic (e.g. children), one or more languages (e.g. ["en"]), and an author era with authorYearStart / authorYearEnd.
Choose the sort order and a maxItems cap (or 0 for every match).
Click Run, then export the results as JSON, CSV or Excel — or fetch them through the Apify API.

Input

{
  "search": "sherlock holmes",
  "topic": "",
  "languages": ["en"],
  "sort": "popular",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Description
`search`	Keywords matched against titles and author names.
`topic`	Single subject/bookshelf keyword filter (e.g. `children`, `history`).
`languages`	Keep only books in these two-letter language codes.
`authorYearStart`	Keep books with an author alive during/after this year.
`authorYearEnd`	Keep books with an author alive during/before this year.
`sort`	`popular`, `ascending` or `descending`.
`maxItems`	Maximum books to collect (`0` = no limit).

What you get

One flat JSON record per book, ready to export to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML:

{
  "id": 1661,
  "title": "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes",
  "authors": [
    { "name": "Doyle, Arthur Conan", "birthYear": 1859, "deathYear": 1930 }
  ],
  "translators": [],
  "subjects": [
    "Detective and mystery stories, English",
    "Private investigators -- England -- Fiction"
  ],
  "bookshelves": ["Category: Crime, Thrillers and Mystery"],
  "languages": ["en"],
  "copyright": false,
  "mediaType": "Text",
  "downloadCount": 96543,
  "formats": {
    "text/plain; charset=us-ascii": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.txt.utf-8",
    "application/epub+zip": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.epub3.images"
  },
  "textUrl": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.txt.utf-8",
  "epubUrl": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661.epub3.images",
  "url": "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661"
}

Building a broader books or research dataset? Pair this with:

OpenLibrary Book Scraper — millions of books by title, author, subject or ISBN.
arXiv Scraper — research papers with metadata and abstracts.
Wikipedia Scraper — articles and structured page data.
Website Content Crawler — crawl any site into clean text for LLM/RAG.

FAQ

What is Project Gutenberg? Project Gutenberg is a volunteer library of over 70,000 free ebooks, mostly older works whose copyright has expired. This Actor makes that catalog searchable and exportable as structured data.

Can I download the actual book text? Yes. Each record includes a formats map plus textUrl and epubUrl shortcuts pointing to the plain-text and EPUB downloads hosted by Project Gutenberg.

How do the filters work together? All filters combine — search, topic, languages and the author-era range are applied together, so you can, for example, find popular English children's books by authors alive in the 1800s.

How many books can I scrape per run? There's no fixed cap. maxItems limits how many books are collected (0 = every match). Larger runs simply take longer.

Is scraping Project Gutenberg data legal? The Actor collects only publicly available catalog data for public-domain works. You are responsible for using it in line with Project Gutenberg's terms and applicable laws.

What's the output format? A structured dataset with one item per book. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel from the Apify Console or API.

Can I use this with n8n, Make or Zapier? Yes. Run it from n8n via the Apify node, or connect it to Make, Zapier, Slack, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients, MCP and webhooks.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Returns only public, public-domain catalog data; you are responsible for compliance with Project Gutenberg's terms. Not affiliated with Project Gutenberg.

Input

Field	Type	Description
`search` Search query	string	Keywords matched against book titles and author names. Multiple words must all match (e.g. "sherlock holmes" or "dickens london"). Leave empty to browse the whole catalog and filter with the options below.
`topic` Topic	string	Filter by a single subject or bookshelf keyword, e.g. "children", "science fiction", "history" or "poetry". Matched against each book's subjects and bookshelves.
`languages` Languages	array	Keep only books available in these two-letter language codes, e.g. ["en"] for English or ["en", "fr"] for English and French. Leave empty for all languages.
`authorYearStart` Author alive from (year)	integer	Keep only books with at least one author alive during or after this year. Negative values mean BCE, e.g. -500. Leave empty for no lower bound.
`authorYearEnd` Author alive until (year)	integer	Keep only books with at least one author alive during or before this year. Negative values mean BCE. Leave empty for no upper bound.
`sort` Sort order	string · popular, ascending, descending	Order of results: most popular (by download count), or by ascending / descending Project Gutenberg ID. Default: `"popular"`
`maxItems` Max books	integer	Maximum number of books to collect across all pages. Use 0 for no limit (collect every matching book). Default: `100`

API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/hipersoft~gutenberg-books-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "search": "sherlock holmes",
  "topic": "children",
  "languages": [
    "en"
  ]
}'

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("hipersoft/gutenberg-books-scraper").call(run_input={
    "search": "sherlock holmes",
    "topic": "children",
    "languages": [
        "en"
    ]
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('hipersoft/gutenberg-books-scraper').call({
  "search": "sherlock holmes",
  "topic": "children",
  "languages": [
    "en"
  ]
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Pricing

Event	Price	Paid plans from
Book Scraped Charged per book scraped.	$0.001	$0.0005

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.

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