Goodreads Books Scraper

Goodreads Books Scraper: search results as rows, with ratings and counts

Type a title, an author or a plain keyword and get Goodreads search results back as rows. Title, author, average rating, how many people rated it, the year of the edition Goodreads lists, the full-size cover and the book link.

What it gives you is the search listing, not the book page. That means ratings and counts, and it means no blurb, no ISBN, no genres and no reviews. The listing also does not show a book's first publication year or its edition count, so those two columns are always empty.

📚 What Goodreads Books Scraper does

It runs each of your search terms and pages through the results until it has your share of the row budget. The budget is split evenly between terms, so four terms and 40 rows gives you ten of each rather than 40 of the first one.

searchField changes the answer more than it looks. Searching christie as an author gives you Agatha Christie's novels. The same word as a title gives you books with Christie in the name. Those are genuinely different result sets, not the same set reordered.

Two things it refuses to bill you for. A book Goodreads lists without a rating is skipped, because a row with no rating is the thing you came for missing. And "Goodreads looked and found nothing" is a real answer, kept separate from "the request never got through", so a term that genuinely has no matches costs nothing per row.

Goodreads serves 20 books per search page, and its deep pages start handing back books you have already seen. Paging stops at 50 pages per term, which is past where distinct results ran out in testing.

📥 What you give it

{
  "queries": ["dune", "project hail mary"],
  "searchField": "all",
  "maxItems": 20
}

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "charged": true,
  "recordType": "book",
  "query": "dune",
  "searchField": "all",
  "rank": 1,
  "bookId": "44767458",
  "title": "Dune (Dune, #1)",
  "author": "Frank Herbert",
  "avgRating": 4.29,
  "ratingsCount": 1712265,
  "publishedYear": null,
  "editionPublishedYear": 2019,
  "editionsCount": null,
  "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767458",
  "coverUrl": "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1555447414i/44767458.jpg",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-26T13:16:35.247Z"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset, and recordType tells them apart.

The charged field is a label, not a receipt. It is stamped when the row is built, before billing happens, so read it the way you read recordType: it separates real books from sample and diagnostic rows, nothing more.

One bad term never stops the others, and a diagnostic row never fails the run.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Goodreads Books Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put one term per line into Search terms. 3. Pick Search in if you want author-only or title-only matching. 4. Set Maximum rows. Start at 20 to see the shape of the output. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.14 per 1,000 books. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per book row delivered. Duplicates across terms, books skipped for having no rating, the sample row, diagnostic rows and a term that finds nothing are all free.

💡 What people use it for

• Checking how an author's back catalogue is rated, by searching them with searchField set to

author and sorting on ratingsCount.

• Building a shortlist for a reading list or a shop buy, where avgRating alone is misleading and

ratingsCount is the number that matters.

• Watching how a new release accumulates ratings week by week, scheduled and deduped on bookId.
• Resolving a messy list of titles to real Goodreads links and ids before enriching it elsewhere.
• Pulling cover images at full size for a catalogue page.

🚧 What it does not do

• Search results only. No blurb, no ISBN, no genres, no page count, no publisher.
• No reviews and no reviewer data. Only the rating average and the count.
• No user shelves, no lists, no author pages, and nothing that needs a Goodreads login.
• Books with no rating are skipped, so a very obscure or just-announced title may not appear.
• 50 pages per term. Goodreads' deep pages repeat, so a single term will not yield thousands of

distinct books however high you set maxItems.

• No first publication year and no edition count. editionPublishedYear is the year of the

edition the listing shows, which for a classic can be decades after it first came out.

• Relevance order is Goodreads', applied before paging, so asking for 20 gives you the 20 it

serves first.

• Rows are a snapshot. Ratings move daily, and scrapedAt records when they were read.

🧭 Which book or title scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Goodreads account or an API key? Neither. Goodreads closed its public API years ago; this reads the public search pages instead.

Can I get the book description or the ISBN? Not from here. Books Scraper covers ISBN, publisher and page count.

Why do author and title searches give different books? Because they are different searches. author matches the writer, title matches words in the name of the book.

Why did I get fewer rows than I asked for? Either the terms ran out of distinct results, or some books had no rating and were skipped. The diagnostic rows say which.

Can I search 20 authors in one run? Yes, one per line, and the row budget splits evenly between them.

Is scraping Goodreads legal? These are public catalogue pages. Author names are personal data under GDPR, so have a reason for collecting them. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a sensible starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the search term you used. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.