Agent skill · magnus919
openlibrary-cli
Search books, authors, and works on Open Library from the terminal. Look
What it needs
About 4k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
openlibrary-cli — Book Metadata from Open Library Search books and authors, look up works and ISBNs, and fetch detailed metadata from the public Open Library API. No API key, no registration — just works. Setup No authentication or API keys needed. The Open Library API is fully public. Only Python 3.8+ and the requests package are required. --help and --dry-run work without any setup. Essential Commands search — Search books by keyword Shows: title, first publish year, authors, edition count. Supports --sort (editions, new, old, rating, title), --lang, --offset, and --availability. search-authors — Search authors by name Shows: name, birth/death years, author key, top work. author — Get author details by key Shows: name, birth/death dates, biography (up to 500 chars), Wikipedia link, personal name. Author keys are the OL#####A identifiers from search results. work — Get work details by key Shows: title, author keys, subjects, description (up to 500 chars). Work keys are the OL#####W identifiers found in search results. isbn — Lookup a book by ISBN Shows: title, author(s), page count, publish date, publisher, subjects (top 5). Accepts both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13. Global Flags These flags work anywhere in the command — before or after the subcommand: Flag Effect ------ -------- --json Output machine-readable JSON instead of human-readable text --dry-run Show what API call would be made without executing it --quiet Suppress non-essential diagnostic output --verbose Enable verbose/debug logging Known Gotchas Public API, rate-limited — No API key is needed, but Open Library enforces rate limits on unauthenticated requests. Set OLEMAIL in your environment to include a contact email in the User-Agent header for better rate limit treatment. ISBN lookup uses an edition endpoint — The isbn command fetches /isbn/{isbn}.json which returns edition-level metadata (publisher, page count, publish date). …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills magnus919/openlibrary-cli