Goodreads Book & Reviews Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Goodreads retired its official API in December 2020, leaving no supported way to pull book metadata, ratings, or review text at scale. This Actor resolves books three ways — direct book, author, or list/shelf (Listopia) URLs, free-text or ISBN search, or a shelf page you already have bookmarked — and returns full book metadata (title, author, series, genres, ISBNs, ratings, awards) plus the reviews Goodreads embeds on the page, in one PPE-priced call.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so Goodreads sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Apify Proxy on every request, escalating to residential exit IPs with no input change if a block ever shows up.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Session rotation on every block — a fresh proxy session and browser fingerprint the moment one gets flagged.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable book IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for book and review rows that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

Use cases

• Catalogue enrichment — backfill title, author, series, ISBN, and cover-image metadata for a bookstore, library, or reading-app catalogue.
• Reader-sentiment research — pull a book's rating distribution and a sample of review text to gauge audience reception before an author/publisher marketing push.
• "Best of" dataset building — resolve every book on a Listopia list or shelf page into one structured dataset for recommendation or curation tools.
• Rating/review monitoring — re-run against the same book URLs on a schedule to track how average rating and ratings count move over time.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052-the-hunger-games"
  ],
  "searchQueries": [],
  "maxBooks": 1,
  "maxSearchResultsPerQuery": 3,
  "includeReviews": true,
  "maxReviewsPerBook": 2,
  "outputMode": "books",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

book_idtitleauthor_nameseries_namegenresnum_pagesisbn13publish_datedescription

{
  "book_id": "2767052",
  "work_id": "2792775",
  "title": "The Hunger Games",
  "title_complete": "The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)",
  "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052-the-hunger-games",
  "author_name": "Suzanne Collins",
  "author_url": "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/153394.Suzanne_Collins",
  "series_name": "The Hunger Games",
  "series_position": "1",
  "genres": [
    "Young Adult",
    "Dystopia",
    "Fiction",
    "Science Fiction"
  ],
  "format": "Hardcover",
  "num_pages": 374,
  "publisher": "Scholastic Press",
  "isbn": "0439023483",
  "isbn13": "9780439023481",
  "asin": null,
  "language": "English",
  "publish_date": "2008-10-14",
  "original_publish_date": "2008-09-14",
  "description": "Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun...",
  "image_url": "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586722975i/2767052.jpg",
  "average_rating": 4.35,
  "ratings_count": 10190318,
  "ratings_count_distribution": [
    133754,
    242196,
    1113954,
    3090721,
    5609693
  ],
  "text_reviews_count": 273383,
  "awards": [
    "Georgia Peach Book Award (WINNER)",
    "Buxtehuder Bulle (WINNER)"
  ],
  "reviews": [
    {
      "review_id": "kca://review:goodreads/amzn1.gr.review:goodreads.v1.-GjjHy9iBCConbkcwszIsw",
      "reviewer_name": "Jayson",
      "reviewer_url": "https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22106879-jayson",
      "reviewer_followers_count": 4318,
      "rating": 4,
      "review_text": "(A-) 83% | Very Good. Notes: A Pax Romana parallel, where odds are ever mostly misses...",
      "like_count": 693,
      "comment_count": 68,
      "has_spoiler": false,
      "created_at": "2020-09-18T02:33:35Z",
      "updated_at": "2026-05-22T05:01:56Z"
    }
  ],
  "reviews_returned_count": 1,
  "source_query": "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052-the-hunger-games",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T00:00:00Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.