Open Library Notes
Open Library is a free online source of book information.
Good info here:
https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books
Works, Books, Editions
Top level concept: Works. These are logical collections of similar editions. No ISBN here since a work doesn’t specifically refer to a particular physical copy of anything.
A Work contains information like Title, and Author, though the latter might be an identifier.
The works pages and API all start with /works. Here’s an example:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7924103W/The_Eye_of_the_World_(The_Wheel_of_Time_Book_1)
That will bring you to the web page for the work. You can turn it into a JSON endpoint by getting rid of the title and tacking on a json to the URL, like this:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7924103W.json
For a given work, you can have many Editions, and this is what we commonly think of as a “book”. These represent a particular instance of a work, one you can actually pick up, hold in your hand, etc. They are usually identified with an ISBN.
You can show all editions of a work from the web page, by using mode=all,
like this:
Or you can use the JSON API, like this:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7924103W/editions.json
To get information about a particular edition, you use the /books prefix,
like this:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9543758M/The_Eye_of_the_World
Like the works, you can turn this into a JSON endpoint like so:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9543758M.json
Using the Book API
Notably the author information at the endpoint is in ID form:
/authors/OL233594A. This will lead to an author’s page:
https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL233594A/Robert_Jordan
Sometimes all you want, though, is an endpoint with all the information in one convenient package. If you have the ISBN, we can do this:
https://openlibrary.org/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:9780812500486&jscmd=data&format=json