Open Library Covers API (Open Library)

[Edit][History] last modified august 4

Our Covers API provides a programmatic method to access the book covers and author photos available in the Open Library Covers Repository.

Book Covers

Book covers can be accessed using ISBN, OCLC, LCCN, OLID (Open Library ID) and ID (internal cover ID).

The covers are available in 3 sizes:

S: Small, suitable for use as a thumbnail on a results page on Open Library,
M: Medium, suitable for display on a details page on Open Library) and,
L: Large

The URL pattern to access book covers is:

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/$key/$value-$size.jpg

Where

key can be any one of ISBN, OLCC, LCCN, OLID and ID (case-insensitive)
value is the value of the chosen key
size can be one of S, M and L for small, medium and large respectively.

By default it returns a blank image if the cover cannot be found. If you append ?default=false to the end of the URL, then it returns a 404 instead.

The following example returns small sized cover image for book with ISBN 0385472579.

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0385472579-S.jpg

The same cover can be accessed in multiple ways using different keys:

http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/olid/OL7440033M-S.jpg
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/0385472579-S.jpg
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780385472579-S.jpg
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/lccn/93005405-S.jpg
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/oclc/28419896-S.jpg
http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/240727-S.jpg

Author Photos

Author photos can be accessed using OLID and ID.

The URL Pattern for accessing author photos is:

http://covers.openlibrary.org/a/$key/$value-$size.jpg

For example the following is the photograph of Donald E. Knuth from the Open Library.

http://covers.openlibrary.org/a/olid/OL229501A-S.jpg