MCP Books

mcp-books

Three great archives hold the scanned record of what was published, and each describes it in its own words. The Internet Archive keeps books, films, recordings and software deposited by anyone, and has run millions of them through optical character recognition. The Library of Congress publishes the national collections of the United States, one catalogue per kind of material. data.bnf.fr publishes the authority records of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which describe works and the people who wrote them rather than copies.

This server reads all three with one question. You can search the words inside the scanned documents, search the catalogues, and read one record in a single shape whichever archive holds it. It needs no API key and no account.

_Version française_

Install

One-click install

Claude Code

claude mcp add books -- npx -y mcp-books

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any client using the standard config format

{

"mcpServers": { "books": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "mcp-books"] } } }

Node 24 or later is required, and no environment variable has to be set.

With Docker

{

"mcpServers": { "books": { "command": "docker", "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/smeet666/mcp-books:2.1.0"] } } }

-i keeps stdin open, which is where the protocol travels, and -t is left out because a TTY rewrites the stream. The container needs outbound HTTPS to archive.org, openlibrary.org, www.loc.gov and data.bnf.fr, and nothing else: no volume, no port, no credential.

Bundle, without npm

Download mcp-books-2.1.0.mcpb from the latest release and open it. A client that supports MCP bundles installs it on its own, with no npm and no configuration file to edit. The bundle carries its dependencies, so nothing is fetched at install time.

What you can ask

• "Which books mention the Beaumont light-house?"
• "Find me anything on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake."
• "Read me that record and tell me who holds the original."
• "What does the BnF have on that author?"
• "Search the photographs rather than the books."

An answer takes several seconds: three archives are asked, each at its own pace.

The three sources

A row's id names its archive, so an identifier read from one answer goes back to the right one. Counts are never added across archives, and an archive that failed is reported as having failed rather than as having found nothing.

Tools

search_inside

Searches the text inside the scanned documents, which came off the page through optical character recognition.

In return: hits, each carrying id, which get_item takes and which names its archive; source and source_name; the archive's own identifier without the prefix; title, creator and year; page_number where the archive states one; excerpts; and excerpt_kind.

`excerpt_kind` decides what an excerpt is worth. A passage is the text around the words that matched. A page_opening is the start of the page, sent because the machine-read text the archive returned stops before those words appear: it does not carry the match, so quoting it quotes something else. All the excerpts of one match are of one kind.

search_items

Searches the catalogues.

The three archives divide their material differently. The Internet Archive searches every kind at once when none is named; the Library of Congress is one route per kind, so a search naming none is told which one was read; and the BnF search reads works. A media_type one archive has no notion of leaves that archive out, and the answer says so.

In return: rows in the shape a hit carries, with per_source giving one report per archive: its status, the count it contributed, its reported_total and reported_total_means, which says what that number counts there.

get_item

Reads one record in a single shape, whichever archive holds it.

In return: the record with its id, source and source_name, the archive's own identifier, title, creator, date exactly as published, and year beside year_means, which says what that year is the year of, since the three archives date a record differently. attribution is what that archive asks to be credited with, and identifier_provisional says when the identifier was built rather than read, so a caller knows it may not resolve.

What an answer states about the archives

Every answer accounts for each archive separately. One that failed, one nobody asked, and one that answered with nothing are three different things, and they are reported as three. A total stays beside the archive that published it, with what that archive counts when it says it: one counts documents, another counts newspaper leaves.

What scanned text is worth

The words inside a scanned document came off the page through optical character recognition. An excerpt carries the misreadings of that process, and it is served as it was read rather than corrected. Quote it as scanned text,