The Open Library

About

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal.

To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (13.4 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 230,000 scanned books.

Openness

All Open Library contributions are in the public domain. See http://openlibrary.org/about/license.

Data

Dump of author records: http://openlibrary.org/data/ol_dump_authors_latest.txt.gz
Dump of edition records: http://openlibrary.org/data/ol_dump_editions_latest.txt.gz
API documentation: http://openlibrary.org/developers/api

Issues

The content negotiation on entity URIs is buggy. Asking for only application/rdf xml works, but asking for multiple types doesn't.

The triple count is a wild guess based on the numbers of 13 million records and 30 triples per record.

Resources

View [unrecognised content type]

[no name] 976ad96e-6897-4ab6-9357-4fe73044ae1e

http://openlibrary.org/data [downloaded 13 times]

View [ontologically represented] ★★★★★ "Linked to other data to provide context."★★★★ "Uses URIs to identify things, so that people can link to it."★★★ "Uses non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV instead of Excel)."★★ "Available as structured data (eg. Excel instead of a scanned table)."★ "Available under an open license."

Example (RDF/XML) example/rdf+xml

Example (RDF/XML)

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6807502M.rdf [downloaded 21 times]

View [open and standardized format] ★★★★★ "Linked to other data to provide context."★★★★ "Uses URIs to identify things, so that people can link to it."★★★ "Uses non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV instead of Excel)."★★ "Available as structured data (eg. Excel instead of a scanned table)."★ "Available under an open license."

Example (JSON) application/json

Example (JSON)

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6807502M.json [downloaded 6 times]

Additional Information

Field	Value
Source	http://openlibrary.org/
Author	Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit
Maintainer	Maintainer not given
namespace	http://openlibrary.org/
shortname	Open Library
triples	400000000