Google Books Tools

Search the Google Books catalog by keyword, title, author, ISBN, and more, or fetch detailed metadata for a specific volume by its ID. Use these tools in workflows that need to look up book information, enrich reading lists, or power book-recommendation agents.

Overview

Operations

Configuration

google_books_search_volumes

google_books_get_volume

Outputs

google_books_search_volumes

• data (json) — Array of matching volume objects returned by the Google Books API. Each item follows the Google Books Volume resource schema (includes id, volumeInfo, saleInfo, accessInfo, etc.).
• metadata (json) — List metadata.
  • metadata.totalItems (number) — Total number of volumes that matched the query across all pages.
  • metadata.count (number) — Number of volumes actually returned in this response (capped by maxResults).

google_books_get_volume

• data (json) — The full volume object for the requested volume ID, following the Google Books Volume resource schema.
• metadata (json) — Volume identifiers.
  • metadata.id (string) — The volume ID of the retrieved book.

YAML Example

google_books_1:
  type: google_books
  name: "Google Books"
  inputs:
    operation: "google_books_search_volumes"
    q: "intitle:dune inauthor:herbert"
    maxResults: 5
    apiKey: "{{GOOGLE_BOOKS_API_KEY}}"
  connections:
    outgoing:
      - target: next-block-id

To retrieve a specific volume by ID instead:

google_books_2:
  type: google_books
  name: "Google Books"
  inputs:
    operation: "google_books_get_volume"
    volumeId: "{{google_books_1.data[0].id}}"
    apiKey: "{{GOOGLE_BOOKS_API_KEY}}"
  connections:
    outgoing:
      - target: next-block-id

Tips

• Get your API key — Enable the Books API in the Google Cloud Console, then create an API key under APIs & Services → Credentials. The key does not require OAuth; a simple unrestricted (or HTTP-referrer-restricted) API key is sufficient for read-only book lookups.
• Use keyword prefixes for precision — The q parameter supports structured keywords (intitle:, inauthor:, isbn:, subject:). Combine them for narrow results, e.g. isbn:9780345339706 to fetch a book by its exact ISBN.
• Chain Search → Get Volume — google_books_search_volumes returns volume IDs in data[N].id. Pass one of those IDs into a subsequent google_books_get_volume block via {{blockName.data[0].id}} to retrieve the full metadata (descriptions, categories, page count, preview links, etc.) for the top result.