Internet Archive Scraper

Internet Archive Scraper: search archive.org for books, audio, film and archived web

Search archive.org the way its own advanced search works, and get the results as rows: the identifier, the title, the creator, the year, the download count, the subject tags and the link. Filter to one media type, sort by downloads, by date or by what was added most recently.

The metadata is written by whoever uploaded the item, so it is uneven. Plenty of items have no creator, no year and no description, and that is the archive rather than a gap here. The sample row further down is exactly that case.

🔍 What Internet Archive Scraper does

Plain keywords work. So does the archive's own query syntax, which is worth knowing if you are doing anything precise: title:(grateful dead) AND year:[1977 TO 1980] does what it looks like it does.

Pick a media type to stay inside books, audio, film, software, images, archived web pages, datasets or collections, or leave it empty and get everything. Sorting is by downloads, by the item's own date, by when it was added to the archive, or by the archive's relevance ranking.

The run pages a hundred at a time until it has the number of unique items you asked for or the result set runs out.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "title:(apollo 11) AND year:[1969 TO 1972]",
  "mediaType": "movies",
  "sort": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 500
}

An OR covers your whole query. When you pick a media type, a query with an OR in it is bracketed before the type is added, so jazz OR blues with audio returns jazz and blues recordings, all of them audio.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "identifier": "apolloaudiocollection",
  "title": "Apollo",
  "creator": null,
  "year": null,
  "date": null,
  "mediaType": "collection",
  "downloads": 1259223,
  "subjects": [],
  "description": null,
  "publicdate": "2010-12-06T19:02:28Z",
  "url": "https://archive.org/details/apolloaudiocollection"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset, and ok tells them apart.

The overview table in the Apify console shows the item columns only, so a diagnostic row looks blank there. Switch to the JSON or All fields view to read it.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Internet Archive Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Type keywords into Search query, or paste an archive.org query if you have one. 3. Pick a Media type unless you want everything. 4. Set Max items, choose a Sort by, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$2.00 per 1,000 items. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per item delivered. Items that appear twice across pages are dropped before they are counted, diagnostic rows are not charged, and a search that matches nothing is not charged.

💡 What people use it for

• Finding every archived recording of a band or a broadcaster, sorted by what people actually play.
• Building a reading list of public domain books on a subject, with the identifiers to fetch them.
• Checking whether a site was captured, using the web media type.
• Tracking what a collection has gained recently, with sort on publicdate and a schedule.
• Handing a model a list of source material with links, rather than a page of search results.

🚧 What it does not do

• Metadata and a link, never the files. No books, audio, video or page captures are downloaded.
• It does not read Wayback Machine snapshots. Archived sites appear as items under the web

media type, not as captures of a URL on a given date.

• Uploader metadata is patchy. Missing creators, years and descriptions are normal.
• downloads cannot tell you zero from missing. Both read 0.
• Collections are containers. A collection row is a shelf, not an item, and it shows up whenever

you leave the media type empty.

• description keeps the uploader's HTML and stops at 500 characters, which can cut mid-tag.
• 10,000 items per run, and archive.org's own result set can end sooner.
• No file lists, sizes or formats. Take the identifier to the archive's item page for those.

🧭 Which archive scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an archive.org account? No. This reads the public search that anyone can use.

Can I download the books or the audio? Not from this actor. Take the identifier from each row and fetch the item's files from archive.org directly.

Why do some rows have no creator or year? Because nobody typed them in when the item was uploaded. The archive accepts what it is given.

Can I use the archive's advanced query syntax? Yes, the query goes through as written. Field searches and date ranges both work.

Is this legal? The search index is public and this reads it the way a browser does. What you may then do with a given item depends on that item's own rights, which vary enormously across the archive. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

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