Anna's Archive Book Search API

Klanker disclosure: This project was vibe-coded. If your agent wants to fix something, we welcome PRs!

A self-hosted REST API for searching and discovering books, built on open datasets scraped from Anna's Archive (Zlib3 metadata, periodically updated) and Goodreads (static snapshot from September 2024).

Downloads two open datasets via torrent (Zlib3 book metadata + Goodreads ratings), imports them into PostgreSQL with full-text search, and serves a JSON API. Does not host or serve any book files — it's a metadata search engine.

Note: The Goodreads dataset is a static snapshot from September 2024 — useful for ratings, genres, descriptions, and semantic search, but not regularly updated by Anna's Archive. The Zlib3 book metadata is updated periodically.

The /download endpoint requires an ANNAS_API_KEY — get one by becoming a member on Anna's Archive. Search and recommendations work without it.

Setup

cp .env.example .env   # edit to set API key, etc.
docker compose up -d

The API container downloads the full datasets via torrent (~40 GB for books, ~5 GB for Goodreads) and imports them into PostgreSQL automatically. The API is live at http://localhost:3100 once the first import finishes.

Import issues? The ingestion pipeline can take a while and occasionally hit snags. If something looks stuck, try asking Claude to help debug — it can check container logs, database state, and the /stats endpoint to diagnose problems.

Related MCP server: grimoire-beholder-mcp

Data Updates

The API checks for new data daily but won't download more than once every 30 days (configurable via UPDATE_INTERVAL_DAYS in .env). Each update downloads the full dataset torrents again — Anna's Archive publishes incremental files, and the importer deduplicates via upsert, so existing records are updated in place. Embeddings are preserved across reimports since row IDs stay stable.

Endpoints

/search supports ?ext=pdf to filter by format and ?dedupe=false to show all formats (default deduplicates by title+author, keeping PDF > epub > other).

/similar accepts an ISBN (most accurate) or an exact book title. Supports ?min_rating= and ?min_reviews= to filter results by quality. Each result includes similarity (0-1) and available (true/false for downloadable copies).

See skills/book-search/SKILL.md for detailed API docs and agent workflows.

Semantic Search (Optional)

For better search quality, you can enable vector embeddings powered by Ollama. Set OLLAMA_URL in .env and pull nomic-embed-text (ollama pull nomic-embed-text). The updater will embed Goodreads records incrementally — this is fully resumable, so it picks up where it left off across restarts. When embeddings are available, /search/goodreads and /similar use vector similarity instead of keyword matching.

You can add OLLAMA_URL at any time — even after the initial data import. The API checks every 24 hours and will start embedding automatically on its next cycle. To start immediately, restart the container: docker compose restart api. The importer validates database integrity before starting embeddings — if corruption is detected, it logs the errors and skips the embedding pass rather than wasting hours on bad data.

Heads up: The initial embedding of the full Goodreads catalog (~11M records) will roughly double your database size and takes a while — speed depends entirely on your GPU. On an RTX 4090 it takes about 21 hours (~149 records/sec); slower hardware could take days or weeks. Subsequent updates only embed new records, so after the first run it stays quick. You can set LIMIT=1000 in .env to embed a small batch first and verify everything works before committing to the full run.

MCP Server

The API includes a built-in MCP endpoint at POST /mcp, so any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.) can use it as a tool server.

Add to your MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anna": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3100/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools: search_books, search_goodreads, find_similar, lookup_isbn, lookup_md5, get_stats, get_download_url. Hit GET /mcp for a quick summary.

The find_similar tool accepts an ISBN (preferred) or exact book title. Pass an ISBN when available for the most reliable match.

The get_download_url tool returns a temporary direct download URL for a book file. To actually download and read the file content (PDF, EPUB, etc.), pair this server with an MCP tool that can fetch URLs and parse document formats.

Claude Code Plugin

This project includes a Claude Code plugin so Claude can search for books from any project.

To install it, add an entry to your ~/.claude/plugins/installed_plugins.json:

{
  "anna-book-search@local": [
    {
      "scope": "user",
      "installPath": "/absolute/path/to/anna",
      "version": "0.2.0",
      "installedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "lastUpdated": "2026-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

Replace installPath with the absolute path to this repo on your machine. After restarting Claude Code, the book search skill will be available in all conversations.