Project Gutenberg · Rate Limits

Gutenberg Rate Limits

The Gutendex API hosted at gutendex.com does not publish explicit rate limits or throttling policies. It is a community-maintained service and users are encouraged to self-host for production workloads. Direct access to the Project Gutenberg website (gutenberg.org) is restricted to human users; robot access requires a minimum 2-second delay between requests per official policy. Bulk downloads should use mirrors or rsync rather than the main website.

Gutenberg Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Project Gutenberg on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions.

Tagged areas include Books, Ebooks, Public Domain, Literature, and Library.

3 Limits
BooksEbooksPublic DomainLiteratureLibraryMetadataEPUB

Limits

Gutendex API - No Published Rate Limit api
No rate limit is enforced or documented. Self-hosting is recommended for production workloads. See https://github.com/garethbjohnson/gutendex for setup instructions.
Project Gutenberg Website - Robot Access Delay website
1
Use the harvest endpoint with wget -w 2 flag for file downloads. Endpoint: https://www.gutenberg.org/robot/harvest See: https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/robot_access.html
Catalog Data - No Limit catalog
Catalog files available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html OPDS feed available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.opds/

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

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Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/gutenberg-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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