8enSmith/mcp-open-library

Overview

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that wraps the Internet Archive's Open Library API. It lets AI assistants search for books and authors by querying Open Library's public data.

Best for

Best for
Developers building AI assistants that need quick access to book and author metadata

Use cases

• Look up book details by title or author
• Retrieve author information and bibliography
• Integrate book search into AI-powered research or reading apps

How to use

Install

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

Tools exposed

• get_book_by_title
• get_authors_by_name
• get_author_info
• get_author_photo
• get_book_cover
• get_book_by_id

Tested with

Claude Desktop

Notes

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that wraps the Internet Archive’s Open Library API. It lets AI assistants search for books and authors by querying Open Library’s public data.

74 stars on GitHub. Last updated 2026-04-22. Licensed MIT.

Use cases

• Look up book details by title or author
• Retrieve author information and bibliography
• Integrate book search into AI-powered research or reading apps

Pros

• Leverages the extensive Open Library catalog with millions of records
• Simple MCP interface makes it easy to plug into any MCP-compatible AI assistant
• Written in TypeScript for type safety and maintainability

Cons

• Depends on Open Library’s public API, which may have rate limits or downtime
• Limited to book and author data; no support for other media types
• Relatively small community (74 stars) may mean slower updates or fewer contributions

Indexed from awesome-mcp-servers-punkpeye and enriched against its public facts.