gutenberg-mcp-server
Server Details
MCP server for Project Gutenberg — 75,000+ public-domain ebooks with full plain-text retrieval.
- Status
- Healthy
- Last Tested
- Transport
- Streamable HTTP
- URL
- Repository
- cyanheads/gutenberg-mcp-server
- GitHub Stars
- 2
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Tool Definition Quality
Average 4.6/5 across 4 of 4 tools scored.
Each tool has a distinct purpose: browsing popular books, fetching metadata, retrieving plain text, and searching the catalog. No overlap.
All tools follow the consistent pattern 'gutenberg_verb_noun' (browse_popular, get_book, get_text, search_books).
Four tools is ideal for this domain: discovery (browse, search), metadata, and text retrieval.
Covers the full workflow: discovery, metadata, and content retrieval. No obvious gaps.
Available Tools
4 toolsgutenberg_browse_popularBrowse Popular Gutenberg BooksRead-onlyIdempotentInspect
Browse the most-downloaded Project Gutenberg books, ordered by popularity. Returns up to 32 titles with their Gutenberg IDs, authors, languages, and download counts. Optionally filter by language or topic. Use this as a discovery entry point — "what are the most popular classics in French?" — or as a heartbeat check that the catalog is reachable.
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | Number of books to return (1–32). Default 20 gives a useful overview without overwhelming context. | |
| topic | No | Filter by a subject or bookshelf keyword (case-insensitive phrase match). Example: "science fiction", "adventure", "detective". Applies on top of the language filter. | |
| languages | No | Restrict to books in these languages (two-character ISO 639-1 codes). Example: ["en"] for English only, ["de", "fr"] for German or French. Omit for all languages. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| cap | Yes | The limit that was applied. |
| books | Yes | Top books by download count, most popular first. |
| shown | Yes | Number of books returned in this response. |
| truncated | Yes | True when the catalog held more matches than were returned. |
| totalInCatalog | Yes | Total books matching the filter in the full catalog (useful for context — "top 20 of 60,000"). |
| truncationCeiling | No | Download count of the least-popular book shown — omitted books have at most this many downloads. |
gutenberg_get_bookGet Gutenberg BookRead-onlyIdempotentInspect
Fetch complete metadata for a Project Gutenberg book by ID — title, authors (with birth/death years), translators, editors, subjects, bookshelves, languages, copyright status, and the full formats map with download URLs for each available format (plain text, HTML, EPUB, cover image, etc.). Use this before gutenberg_get_text to confirm a plain-text format is available and to get the direct download URL.
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | Yes | Project Gutenberg book ID. Visible in Gutenberg URLs (e.g., gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342) and returned by gutenberg_search_books and gutenberg_browse_popular. Example: 1342 for Pride and Prejudice, 2600 for War and Peace. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| id | Yes | Gutenberg ID. |
| title | Yes | Book title. |
| authors | Yes | Primary author(s). |
| editors | Yes | Editors, if any. |
| formats | Yes | Map of MIME type to download URL. Key types: "text/plain; charset=utf-8" (preferred for gutenberg_get_text), "text/html", "application/epub+zip", "image/jpeg" (cover). Not every format is present for every book. |
| summary | Yes | Auto-generated summary of the work, when available. Absent on many older records. |
| subjects | Yes | Library of Congress subject headings. |
| copyright | Yes | Copyright status: false = public domain in the USA, true = under copyright, null = unknown. |
| languages | Yes | Two-character language codes for this edition. |
| media_type | Yes | "Text" for readable books, "Sound" for audio books. Only "Text" books have plain-text content available for gutenberg_get_text. |
| bookshelves | Yes | Project Gutenberg bookshelf categories (e.g., "Best Books Ever Listings", "Category: Classics of Literature"). |
| translators | Yes | Translators, if this is a translated work. |
| download_count | Yes | Total downloads — popularity signal. |
| has_plain_text | Yes | True if media_type is "Text" AND a UTF-8 text/plain format ("text/plain; charset=utf-8") is present in formats — prerequisite for gutenberg_get_text. |
gutenberg_get_textGet Gutenberg Book TextRead-onlyIdempotentInspect
Retrieve the plain-text content of a Project Gutenberg book, stripped of the standard license header and footer so the response contains only the literary work. For long works — novels routinely run 500KB–2MB — use offset and limit to read in chunks rather than fetching the whole book at once. The response reports totalChars and remainingChars so the caller can page through without guessing. Prefers UTF-8 plain text; falls back to an HTML edition converted to text; refuses audio books (media_type "Sound") with a clear error.
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | Yes | Project Gutenberg book ID. Use gutenberg_search_books or gutenberg_get_book to find IDs. Example: 1342 for Pride and Prejudice, 2600 for War and Peace, 84 for Frankenstein. | |
| limit | No | Maximum number of characters to return in this chunk. Default 20,000 (~4–5 pages of prose). Increase toward 50,000 for large context windows. The actual returned length may be slightly less than limit when a natural paragraph boundary is found within 500 characters of the limit — check the length field in the response for the actual character count returned. | |
| offset | No | Character offset into the stripped literary text at which to start reading. 0 returns the beginning of the work. To read subsequent chunks, use offset = prior_offset + prior_length (the length field from the previous response — NOT offset + limit, because the actual returned length may be slightly less than limit due to paragraph-boundary trimming). |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| id | Yes | Gutenberg book ID. |
| text | Yes | The requested chunk of literary text, stripped of Gutenberg license boilerplate. Encoding: UTF-8. Line endings: normalized to LF. |
| title | Yes | Book title, from the catalog record. |
| length | Yes | Number of characters in this chunk. |
| offset | Yes | Character offset where this chunk begins. |
| hasMore | Yes | True if there is more text after this chunk. When true, call again with offset = offset + length. |
| provenance | Yes | One-line source note with Project Gutenberg ID, title, and license URL. |
| totalChars | Yes | Total characters in the stripped literary text. Use with offset and length to determine progress and plan subsequent calls. |
| sourceFormat | Yes | The format that was fetched. "text/html" indicates HTML-to-text conversion was applied because no plain-text format was available. |
| remainingChars | Yes | Characters remaining after this chunk (totalChars - offset - length). 0 means this chunk includes the end of the book. |
gutenberg_search_booksSearch Gutenberg BooksRead-onlyIdempotentInspect
Search the Project Gutenberg catalog of 78,000+ public-domain books. Matches title and author name with query words; filters by topic (subject or bookshelf keyword), language, author lifespan, or a specific list of Gutenberg IDs. Results are ordered by popularity (download count) by default. Returns book ID, title, authors, languages, subjects, and download count — use gutenberg_get_book for the full formats map before fetching text.
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| ids | No | Narrow results to specific Gutenberg ID numbers. Other filters still apply. Useful for batch pre-fetching known IDs; use gutenberg_get_book for single-ID lookups. | |
| page | No | Page number for paginated results (1-indexed). Each page returns up to 32 books. Use totalCount to determine total pages. | |
| sort | No | Result ordering. "popular" (default) sorts by download count descending. "ascending" and "descending" sort by Gutenberg ID number. | popular |
| query | No | Words to match against book titles and author names (case-insensitive, space-separated). Example: "dickens expectations" matches Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. | |
| topic | No | Case-insensitive phrase to match against subjects and bookshelves. Example: "detective" returns books on the "Detective and Mystery Stories" bookshelf. Separate from query — topic searches categorization metadata, not title/author. | |
| languages | No | Filter to books in any of these two-character ISO 639-1 language codes. Example: ["en"] for English, ["fr", "de"] for French or German. | |
| author_year_end | No | Include only books with at least one author alive on or before this year. Example: author_year_start=1800 with author_year_end=1899 returns books with 19th-century authors. | |
| author_year_start | No | Include only books with at least one author alive on or after this year (positive = CE, negative = BCE). Combine with author_year_end for a range. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| page | Yes | Current page number. |
| books | Yes | Matching books, ordered by the sort parameter. |
| hasMore | Yes | True if there are additional pages of results. |
| totalCount | Yes | Total number of books matching the query across all pages. |
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