Books MCP server

mcp-books

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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:2.0.1"]
    }
  }
}

-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-2.0.1.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

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.