Wolne Lektury

About Wolne Lektury

The Wolne Lektury API provides programmatic access to information about literary works, their fragments, and metadata from the WolneLektury.pl digital library. Responses are serialized in JSON by default, with XML available by adding a format=xml parameter to any request.

The API exposes endpoints for books, audiobooks, DAISY files, authors, epochs, genres, literary kinds, themes, and collections. Each item in these lists includes an href attribute linking to detailed data for that item, such as a specific book or author. Queries can combine authors, epochs, genres, and kinds to filter works matching multiple criteria, and a parent_books filter can restrict results to top-level works only, excluding their sub-works. The same filtering approach can be applied to search for fragments within works, with results linking to detailed fragment data.

The API is maintained by the Wolne Lektury foundation, a Polish organization that provides free access to classic literature, audiobooks, and educational materials, based in Warsaw.

Key features

• Provides access to books, audiobooks, and DAISY files via REST endpoints
• Lists authors, epochs, genres, kinds, themes, and collections
• Supports filtering books by combining author, epoch, genre, and kind
• Retrieves parent (top-level) works only, excluding sub-works, via /parent_books/
• Retrieves text fragments filtered by author and theme
• Supports JSON (default) and XML output via format parameter

Frequently asked questions