Ask HN: Free book database?

7 points·wwortiz··7 comments

Does anyone know of a book database that is perhaps opensource or free?

What I'm looking for is how to access book titles, authors, ISBN, et cetera ;and if possible descriptions and covers.

If there isn't any open source or free ones are there non-free options?

Thanks.

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Open Library, perhaps? It's run by Archive.org and has a developer API: http://openlibrary.org

ETA: I see they also offer raw JSON downloads of their entire collection: http://openlibrary.org/data#downloads

Thank you, that looks similar to what I was looking for.

Could you clarify a bit, not sure what you're looking for exactly.

On one extreme, it doesn't sound too hard to build your own db schema for this in MySQL or PostgreSQL. On the other, there's Google Books.

I'm not looking for schema but rather access to a database of books like say you had a website like amazon without the shopping part but still had all the information on all the books, I was wondering if that information was easily obtainable.

I didn't even think about google books though I will have to look and see what their api allows.

Ah, got it. Google Books and Project Gutenberg are the only two non-commercial ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I am also working on a web app involving books, and currently using Amazon to get my books data. It seems to have anything you'll need, even the book's dimension and weight.

Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) Is a good one - choice is narrow, but a lot of important stuff in there!

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