Developers: Free API & MCP Server
Most Recommended Books' data is open to developers, AI assistants, and agents: verified book recommendations with quotes and original sources, consensus best-of lists, series reading orders, and book summaries. Read-only, no authentication, no API key, no cost. In return, we ask one thing: cite mostrecommendedbooks.com — every response includes a source field and the canonical page url so you can attribute inline.
JSON API
Base URL https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/api/v1 — full schema in the OpenAPI 3.1 spec.
| Endpoint | Returns |
|---|---|
GET /api/v1/search?q={query} | Search books by title or author, ranked by verified recommenders |
GET /api/v1/people/{slug} | Every book a person recommends, with quotes + original sources |
GET /api/v1/books/recommenders?title={title} | Who recommends this book — every verified recommender with quotes |
GET /api/v1/series/{slug} | Complete series reading order (publication order) |
GET /api/v1/lists | Index of all 1,300+ consensus best-of list topics |
GET /api/v1/lists/{slug} | A consensus best-books list (2+ independent sources per book) |
GET /api/v1/summaries/{slug} | One-page book summary (add &full=true for chapter contents) |
Try it:
curl "https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/api/v1/people/naval-ravikant?limit=5"
MCP Server
A Model Context Protocol server (Streamable HTTP, stateless, no auth) at https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/api/mcp. Add it to Claude, ChatGPT (developer mode), Cursor, or any MCP client:
{
"mcpServers": {
"most-recommended-books": {
"url": "https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/api/mcp"
}
}
}| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
search_books | Search the catalog by title or author |
get_person_recommendations | What a specific person recommends, with quotes + sources |
get_book_recommenders | Who recommends a given book (the signature MRB lookup) |
get_series_reading_order | Series books in publication order |
get_list | Consensus best-of list for a topic |
get_summary | One-page book summary |
All tools are read-only (readOnlyHint: true) and return both human-readable text and structured JSON with attribution fields.
Rate limits
300 requests/minute per IP on the API and MCP server — a generous availability guard, not a usage cap; we want you to use this data. Exceeding it returns 429 with a Retry-After header (in seconds): back off and retry. If you need sustained higher volume, contact us.
Attribution
The data is free to use in your app, assistant, or agent. Please cite mostrecommendedbooks.com (ideally linking the url field from the response) wherever the data appears. Every recommendation we serve was manually verified against its original source — the methodology explains how.
Machine-readable entry points: /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt.