Project Gutenberg Scraper
Spider read gutenberg.org in 114 ms without a browser and returned 142 lines of clean markdown, including sections like "Get Help", "How to Help" and "Special Areas".
* ✓ **Volunteer-based** - hundreds of volunteers have contributed over the years* ✓ Read about our late CEO, **Dr. Greg Newby**.* Consider a small donation to help us digitize more books: donatePride and Prejudice by Jane AustenMoby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman MelvilleA Room with a View by E. M. ForsterRomeo and Juliet by William ShakespeareCrime and Punishment by Fyodor DostoyevskyThe Secret of Chimneys by Agatha ChristieThe Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward RadcliffeThe Green Mummy by Fergus Hume### Get Help* Reading Options & Kindle: How to read and enjoy our ebooks.* Frequently Asked Questions about Project Gutenberg.* Help, How-To and FAQs: In depth information about many topics.### How to Help* Distributed Proofreaders welcomes new volunteers. This is the main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks. Getting started is easy, and just a page a day will help!* Fix and improve Project Gutenberg by reporting errors, bugs, typos, and suggesting changes.* Record audiobooks with our friends at LibriVox.### Special Areas* Donating to Project Gutenberg.* Linking to Project Gutenberg and roboting or crawling the site.* Permissions, copyright, licensing, and trademark information.* What does free eBook (No Cost or Freedom?) mean?### Audio BooksAudio books are a great way to enjoy literature. We recommend the following sources. All of them are digitizations of Project Gutenberg texts. They are freely available and in the public domain in the US.* - Project Gutenberg’s 662 titles read by people* - Human-read audio books from LibriVox. LibriVox is a volunteer community that produces high-quality performances.* - The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection. Almost 5,000 computer-generated titles from 2023 via a Project Gutenberg collaboration with Microsoft and MIT.* - Project Gutenberg’s audio books from 2003. They are computer-generated and listenable but relatively low quality compared to today’s technology.The same call, in code.
The capture above came back as markdown. These examples add a key, so you get browser rendering, proxies, and concurrency on gutenberg.org.
import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";
const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY!,
});
await spider.connect();
const page = spider.page!;
await page.goto("https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads");
// No selectors, no schema. Spider reads the page and names the fields.
const data = await page.scrape();
console.log(data);
await spider.close();import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";
const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY!,
});
await spider.connect();
const page = spider.page!;
await page.goto("https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads");
const data = await page.evaluate(`(() => {
const books = [];
document.querySelectorAll(".booklink").forEach(el => {
const title = el.querySelector(".title")?.textContent?.trim();
const author = el.querySelector(".subtitle")?.textContent?.trim();
const downloads = el.querySelector(".extra")?.textContent?.trim();
const link = el.querySelector("a.link")?.getAttribute("href");
if (title) books.push({ title, author, downloads, link });
});
return JSON.stringify({ total: books.length, books: books.slice(0, 20) });
})()`);
console.log(JSON.parse(data));
await spider.close();Ready for volume? Get an API key →
Fields you can pull.
Spider names these from the page. The capture above came back as markdown; the same
call with return_format: "json" returns them as keys.
What gutenberg.org costs to scrape.
The capture above cost $0.00005 to fetch. Pricing is $1 per GB of pre-transformation bandwidth plus $0.001 per CPU minute, so a page like this one lands at a fraction of a cent. Failed requests are billed at $0.
- Free balance on signup
- No card required to test
- Balance never expires
Run it keyless, no account
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Start scraping gutenberg.org.
You already have the call. A key raises the rate limit and turns on browser rendering, proxies, and concurrency. Balance never expires, and top-ups go through secure checkout.