Ask HN: Free books database

[aberatiu]

I'm looking for a (free) book database with name, author, publication year and maybe a small description for every book contained. I need it for a school project. Can anyone help me find one?

[m_ram]

Try http://openmetadata.lib.harvard.edu/bibdata

It's free, downloadable, and has records on almost 13 million items. Just going by the API (http://dp.la/dev/wiki/Item_API), it looks like it has the information that you need.

[skidoo]

Project Gutenberg is my personal favorite:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

[mjhea0]

check out http://isbndb.com

http://isbndb.com/book/the_wind_up_bird_chronicles

[aberatiu]

That's nice (and with the information I want), but I need something that I can download (an .sql, json, xml or even csv)...

[gbl08ma]

They have an API: http://isbndb.com/api/v1/docs/intro

According to that API intro page, their databases contain over 1.8 million entries for books alone, so the download would be rather big I think.