gutenberg

gutenberg is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from magnus919/agent-skills. It costs 125 tokens per session (2,178 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line toolkit for finding and downloading free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, a library of public-domain books. It can retrieve plain text or EPUB files, remove catalogue boilerplate, extract text, and identify fiction or non-fiction.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to search by title, author, or keyword, download a book by its Gutenberg ID, extract clean text from an EPUB, and run a complete search-to-download pipeline.
Why use it?
It removes the manual work of searching the catalogue, choosing a format, cleaning downloaded files, and preparing book text for further use. No account or API key is needed for the catalogue search.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 scripts/gutenberg download 2701 --format txt --output ./books/.

Good fit Use it to search by title, author, or keyword, download a book by its Gutenberg ID, extract clean text from an EPUB, and run a complete search-to-download pipeline.

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Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/magnus919/agent-skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin gutenberg/plugin install gutenberg after adding the marketplace above.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for gutenberg

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for gutenberg

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/gutenberg.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,178 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00125 $0.02178
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01089
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00436
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00218

Measured 7d ago against content hash a0e018980485, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gutenberg scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

Python standard library (urllib.request, json, html.parser, zipfile, re, sys). For
gutenberg/SKILL.md · 183 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 183 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Gutenberg — Public Domain Book Toolkit

Search, download, and extract clean text from Project Gutenberg — 70,000+ free public-domain ebooks. Ships a portable Python CLI with zero external dependencies.

Quick Start

# Search for books
python3 scripts/gutenberg search "Moby Dick"

# Download by Gutenberg ID (plain text)
python3 scripts/gutenberg download 2701 --format txt

# Download EPUB (for illustrated books)
python3 scripts/gutenberg download 2701 --format epub

# Extract clean text (strips PG boilerplate)
python3 scripts/gutenberg extract 2701

# Classify fiction vs non-fiction
python3 scripts/gutenberg classify 2701

# Full pipeline: search → download → extract
python3 scripts/gutenberg pipeline "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

How It Works

Project Gutenberg provides 70,000+ free public-domain ebooks in multiple formats. The gutendex API (https://gutendex.com) offers a free, unauthenticated JSON catalog. No API key required — just curl or this CLI.

Data Flow

User provides title/ID/author
       ↓
gutendex API search → pick book by ID
       ↓
Download plain text (preferred) or EPUB (fallback for illustrated books)
       ↓
Strip PG boilerplate → clean text
       ↓
Classify fiction/non-fiction → extract content

CLI Reference

search — Find books by keyword

python3 scripts/gutenberg search "Moby Dick"
python3 scripts/gutenberg search "Dracula" --limit 5
python3 scripts/gutenberg search "Sherlock Holmes" --json
python3 scripts/gutenberg search "Alice" --language en

Returns: ID, title, author (with life dates), language, subjects, download count. Results sorted by download count (most popular first).

metadata — Get full metadata for a book by ID

python3 scripts/gutenberg metadata 2701          # Moby Dick
python3 scripts/gutenberg metadata 11            # Alice's Adventures
python3 scripts/gutenberg metadata 1342          # Pride and Prejudice
python3 scripts/gutenberg metadata 1342 --json   # JSON-only output

Read the full file on GitHub · 183 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago Changed · +1 lines · +16 tokens per session a0e018980485
  2. 11d ago First seen · 182 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 6c4deb9df10c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gutenberg is a skill published in the GitHub repository magnus919/agent-skills (76 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 2,178 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.