openlibrary

openlibrary is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from magnus919/agent-skills. It costs 113 tokens per session (3,262 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line interface for Open Library, a public catalogue of books and authors. It can look up works, editions, ISBNs, ratings, cover images, and author information through a public API.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to search books and authors, follow records by ISBN or catalogue ID, list editions, read community ratings, and resolve cover-image URLs.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually search the catalogue or build API access from scratch. The tool also helps distinguish a book's general work from its individual editions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to search books and authors, follow records by ISBN or catalogue ID, list editions, read community ratings, and resolve cover-image URLs.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/magnus919/agent-skills/openlibrary
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add magnus919/agent-skills --skill openlibrary
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/magnus919/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin openlibrary/plugin install openlibrary 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 openlibrary

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/openlibrary"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/magnus919/agent-skills/openlibrary.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 113 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,262 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 $0.00113 $0.03262
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01631
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00652
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00326

Measured 6d ago against content hash 67b58138800b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

openlibrary 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/test_openlibrary.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

(`curl -L`; `requests` does by default) or they parse an HTML redirect page.
openlibrary/SKILL.md · 262 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 262 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

openlibrary — Book Metadata from Open Library

Query Open Library's 50M+ record catalog over its public HTTP API: search works and authors, walk the edition/work/author graph by ISBN or OLID, enumerate editions, and read community ratings. No API key exists; everything here is a keyless GET.

Setup

Nothing to authenticate: the public Open Library API requires no API key for reads. There is no token, no registration step, no lazy-auth dance.

# Optional etiquette: identified User-Agent gets ~3x rate budget (~3 req/s vs ~1)
export OL_EMAIL="[email protected]"

Requires Python 3.8+ and requests only. --help and --dry-run work with no environment at all. Write endpoints exist upstream but require an authenticated Internet Archive session and are effectively internal — treat this surface as read-only.

Three hosts matter and they serve different things:

Host Serves
openlibrary.org metadata JSON: search, records, ratings
covers.openlibrary.org cover images + author photos (separate service)
archive.org scan content / bulk dumps (redirect targets)

Essential Commands

find books — search

openlibrary search --query "dune"                       # relevance order
openlibrary search --query "dune" --sort editions       # most editions first
openlibrary search --query "dune" --sort new            # newest first
openlibrary search --query "foundation" --lang fr       # prefer French editions
openlibrary search --query "dune" --limit 5 --offset 10 # paginate
openlibrary search --query "dune" --json                # machine-readable

Results carry title, authors, first_publish_year, edition count, and the work key (/works/OL…W) that feeds the other commands. The CLI validates --sort choices client-side because an unknown sort value makes the server return a plain-text HTTP 500.

find people who write — author search

openlibrary search-authors --query "asimov"             # name candidates
openlibrary search-authors --query "le guin" --limit 5
openlibrary search-authors --query "asimov" --json      # includes top_work, work_count

Read the full file on GitHub · 262 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 6d ago First seen · 262 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A 67b58138800b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

openlibrary is a skill published in the GitHub repository magnus919/agent-skills (75 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 3,262 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 2026-09-03.

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