Open Library MCP

Example Use Cases

• 1

  Search for books by title and return structured metadata (authors, publish year, edition count, cover URL) for use in responses or recommendations.

• 2

  Look up author profiles and photos (by Open Library key/OLID) to provide biographical context or validate author identities.

• 3

  Fetch book covers and detailed edition data by identifier (ISBN, OCLC, LCCN, OLID) for display, citation, or preview links.

Description

This project implements a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that exposes tools for searching books by title, finding authors by name, retrieving detailed author and book information, and obtaining cover/photo URLs from the Open Library API. It provides structured JSON outputs suitable for integration into AI assistants and MCP-compatible clients. The server can be run locally or in Docker and is intended to simplify programmatic access to Open Library data for agents and applications.