# Gutendex

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/gutendex/  
**Website:** https://gutendex.com  
**APIs profiled:** 1

Gutendex is a simple, self-hosted JSON-based web API for serving book catalog information from Project Gutenberg, providing structured metadata for over 70,000 free ebooks including titles, authors, subjects, bookshelves, languages, copyright status, media types, downloadable formats, and download counts. The hosted instance at gutendex.com runs the open-source Django project by Gareth B. Johnson under the MIT license.

## Kin Score — 45.3 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 45.3).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 68.5 |
| Contract Quality | 71.3 |
| Governance | 25.0 |
| Contract Governance | 25.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 31.6 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 33.3 |
| Commercial Clarity | 31.6 |
| Access Clarity | 31.6 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 31.5 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 41.8 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | na |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | na |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | verified |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | na |

## Access

Free · Open access — onboarding: open, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (1)

- **Gutendex Books API** — Query and retrieve metadata for Project Gutenberg ebooks.

## Agentic access (1)

- **Gutendex Agentic Access** — 2 operations

## Security (1)

- **Gutendex Domain Security** — TLSv1.3

## Plans (1)

- **Gutendex Plans Pricing**

## Use cases (6)

- **Literature Analytics** — Power large-scale analysis of public-domain literature by ingesting the structured Project Gutenberg catalog.
- **Educational Apps** — Build classroom or self-study apps that surface public-domain texts by subject, author, or reading level.
- **Reading Recommendation Engines** — Use the download_count and bookshelf data to recommend popular classics or themed reading lists.
- **Digital Library Backends** — Power library catalog interfaces and ebook reader apps with a clean JSON facade over Project Gutenberg's XML archives.
- **Natural Language Processing Datasets** — Use the catalog to discover bulk text downloads for training language models on public-domain corpora.
- **Citation and Reference Tools** — Power author/title lookup widgets in citation managers and academic writing tools.

## Tags

Books, Catalog, Ebooks, Library, Literature, Metadata, Open-Source, Project Gutenberg, Public APIs, Public Domain

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/gutendex/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.