MCP Open Library: Instant Literary Intelligence for Your AI Applications

Stop building book search from scratch. This MCP server gives your AI assistant instant access to millions of books and authors through a clean, structured interface to the Internet Archive's Open Library.

The Problem with Literary Data Integration

Building book search functionality typically means wrestling with multiple APIs, inconsistent data formats, and complex authentication schemes. You end up writing custom parsers, handling rate limits, and maintaining brittle integrations just to answer basic questions about books and authors.

Meanwhile, the Open Library contains detailed metadata for over 20 million books — but its REST API returns verbose, nested JSON that's tedious to work with directly in AI contexts.

Six Tools That Actually Matter

This MCP server transforms the Open Library API into six focused tools that your AI can use immediately:

Book Operations:

• get_book_by_title - Search by title, get structured results with covers and metadata
• get_book_by_id - Fetch detailed book info using ISBN, OCLC, LCCN, or OLID
• get_book_cover - Direct cover image URLs in your preferred size

Author Operations:

• get_authors_by_name - Author search with birth dates, work counts, and top works
• get_author_info - Complete author profiles with biographies and alternate names
• get_author_photo - Author photo URLs ready for display

Each tool returns clean, normalized data that your AI can reason about without additional parsing.

Real-World Applications

Content Creation Tools: Your writing assistant can instantly pull book summaries, author biographies, and publication dates to fact-check manuscripts or generate bibliographies.

Reading Recommendation Engines: Build personalized book suggestions by combining Open Library metadata with user preferences - no complex ML pipeline required.

Educational Applications: Create interactive study guides that pull real book data, author timelines, and cover images for literature courses.

Bookstore Integration: Enrich product pages with detailed metadata, author photos, and related works without maintaining your own book database.

Here's what a typical interaction looks like:

// Search for books
{
  "title": "Dune"
}

// Returns structured data with covers and metadata
{
  "title": "Dune",
  "authors": ["Frank Herbert"],
  "first_publish_year": 1965,
  "edition_count": 180,
  "cover_url": "https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/8279831-M.jpg"
}

Integration That Just Works

One-Line Install with Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @8enSmith/mcp-open-library --client claude

Manual Setup for Custom Workflows:

git clone https://github.com/8enSmith/mcp-open-library.git
cd mcp-open-library && npm install && npm run build

The server requires no API keys, handles rate limiting automatically, and works with any MCP-compatible client. Add it to your Claude Desktop configuration, Cline setup, or custom MCP implementation — it connects in seconds.

Docker Support: Test locally or deploy to production with the included Dockerfile. The server exposes standard MCP endpoints and integrates with your existing infrastructure.

TypeScript Native: Full type definitions included, with Zod validation ensuring data integrity. The codebase is clean, well-tested, and ready for contributions.

This isn't another API wrapper — it's a focused tool that solves the specific problem of getting book data into AI workflows efficiently. Install it once, and your AI assistant immediately knows about millions of books and authors.