MCP server for Project Gutenberg — 75,000+ public-domain ebooks with full plain-text retrieval.
MCP server for Project Gutenberg — 75,000+ public-domain ebooks with full plain-text retrieval. The gutenberg mcp server wraps that behind the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant can use it through 6 defined tools rather than through you.
Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:
gutenberg_search_books — Search the Gutenberg catalog by title, author, topic, language, or author lifespan — returns popularity-ordered results with IDs ready for follow-upgutenberg_get_book — Fetch complete metadata for a book by ID — full formats map, translators, editors, subjects, bookshelves, copyright status, and the has_plain_textgutenberg_get_text — Retrieve the plain-text content of a book, stripped of license boilerplate, with offset/limit chunking for context-budget managementgutenberg_browse_popular — Browse the most-downloaded books, optionally filtered by language or topic — useful as a discovery entry pointPrerequisites — The Prerequisites tool exposed by this serverInstallation — The Installation tool exposed by this serverBeing a remote server, there is no local install. You register the endpoint with your client, authorise it once, and the tools appear.
You will need 4 environment variables: MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE, MCP_LOG_LEVEL, GUTENDEX_BASE_URL, GUTENBERG_TEXT_BASE_URL. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.
This sits in the file and storage access group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Gutenberg's toolset — gutenberg_search_books, gutenberg_get_book, gutenberg_get_text and 3 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by cyanheads; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| gutenberg_search_books | Search the Gutenberg catalog by title, author, topic, language, or author lifespan — returns popularity-ordered results with IDs ready for follow-up calls |
| gutenberg_get_book | Fetch complete metadata for a book by ID — full formats map, translators, editors, subjects, bookshelves, copyright status, and the has_plain_text flag |
| gutenberg_get_text | Retrieve the plain-text content of a book, stripped of license boilerplate, with offset/limit chunking for context-budget management |
| gutenberg_browse_popular | Browse the most-downloaded books, optionally filtered by language or topic — useful as a discovery entry point |
| Prerequisites | The Prerequisites tool exposed by this server. |
| Installation | The Installation tool exposed by this server. |
{
"mcpServers": {
"gutenberg-mcp-server": {
"type": "streamable-http",
"url": "https://gutenberg.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
}
}
}Configuration as documented by the project. Restart the client after saving.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
| MCP_LOG_LEVEL | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
| GUTENDEX_BASE_URL | Endpoint or connection string the server talks to. | Yes |
| GUTENBERG_TEXT_BASE_URL | Endpoint or connection string the server talks to. | Yes |
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