Open Public Domain

MCP server that gives AI agents access to the world's public domain library. Search, read, and navigate books and audiobooks from Project Gutenberg and LibriVox.

What It Does

Agents can't read books. This fixes that.

Every other tool gives agents access to APIs, databases, and live data. But the written knowledge of human civilization -- books, essays, speeches, historical documents -- is largely inaccessible to agents through clean, legal APIs. Open Public Domain opens that up.

Related MCP server: opds-mcp

Sources

Tools

Text (Gutenberg)

• search_books -- Search across all sources by title, author, or subject. Returns metadata.

• get_book -- Full metadata for a book, including parsed chapter list.

• read_chapter -- Read a specific chapter. The natural unit of reading.

• read_work -- Full text for short works (essays, poems, short stories under ~15k chars).

• search_text -- Full-text search within a book. Find where a concept appears across chapters, with context.

Audio (LibriVox)

• search_audiobooks -- Search LibriVox by title or author.

• list_audio_chapters -- List all audio chapters for an audiobook with MP3 URLs and durations.

• get_audio_chapter -- Get the MP3 URL for a specific chapter.

Setup

Claude Desktop / Cursor / Windsurf

Add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "open-public-domain": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "open-public-domain"]
    }
  }
}

Hermes

Add to ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

mcp_servers:
  open-public-domain:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "open-public-domain"]

Development

git clone https://github.com/stuchapin909/open-public-domain.git
cd open-public-domain
npm install
npm start

Design Decisions

Chapter-level navigation, not full-book dumps. A novel is 150,000+ tokens. Agents can't process that. read_chapter gives the agent one chapter at a time -- the same way a human reads.

Full-text search with context. search_text lets an agent say "where does Hobbes talk about the state of nature?" and get back the passage with surrounding context, plus which chapter it's in.

No API keys. All sources are public domain with open APIs. No configuration needed.

Unified search. search_books aggregates across all sources. The agent doesn't need to know or care which source a book comes from.

Roadmap

• Standard Ebooks integration (better formatting, curated catalog)

• Wikisource integration (primary source documents)

• Internet Archive public domain subset

• DOAB (open access academic books)

• HathiTrust public domain collection

• Semantic search across full text

• Cross-book citation and quotation tracking

License

MIT