Open Library Data Dumps

Open Library provides dumps of all its data, generated every month. All of the dumps are formatted as tab separated files with the following columns:

• type - type of record (/type/edition, /type/work etc.)
  
• key - unique key of the record. (/books/OL1M etc.)
  
• revision - revision number of the record
  
• last_modified - last modified timestamp
  
• JSON - the complete record in JSON format

Dumps

• editions dump (~ 9.2G)
  
• works dump (~ 2.9G)
  
• authors dump (~ 0.5G)
  
• all types dump (~ 12.4G): includes editions, works, authors, redirects, etc.
  
• complete dump (~ 29.6G): also includes past revisions of all the records in Open Library
  
• ratings dump (~ 5M): with columns: "Work Key, Edition Key (optional), Rating, Date"
  
• reading log dump (~ 65M): with columns "Work Key, Edition Key (optional), Shelf, Date"
  
• redirects dump (~ 50M)
  
• deletes dump (~ ?M)
  
• lists dump (~ ?M)
  
• other dump (~ ?M)

For past dumps, see: https://archive.org/details/ol_exports?sort=-publicdate

Downloading the dumps take too long? Checkout the link above and download via torrent for higher speeds!

Format of JSON records

A JSON schema for the various types is located at https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client/tree/master/olclient/schemata

• Author Records: JSON serialization of a type/author
  
• Edition Records: JSON serialization of a type/edition
  
• Work Records: JSON serialization of a type/work

Using Open Library Data Dumps

Please see this great guide by contributor on the LibrariesHacked github about how to load Open Library's data dumps into postgres to make it more useful and queriable:
https://github.com/LibrariesHacked/openlibrary-search

GraphQL

DiFronzo on github has produced a graphql proxy to search books using work, edition and ISBN with Open Library API. Deployed with Deno and GraphQL:

https://github.com/DiFronzo/OpenLibrary-GraphQL
DiFronzo/OpenLibrary-GraphQL

OL Covers Dump

We do not yet have rolling monthly dumps of our book covers, despite a shared desire for its existence. Some historical cover dumps may be explored here:
https://archive.org/details/ol_data?tab=collection&query=identifier%3Acovers&sort=-addeddate