
Apple Books
Accesses your Apple Books library data to retrieve books, highlights, notes, and reading activity. Helps organize and analyze your personal reading collection.
Provides access to Apple Books library data, enabling retrieval and search of book collections, highlights, notes, and reading activity for personalized book organization and recommendations.
What it does
- Search through book highlights and notes
- List books organized by collections
- Retrieve reading annotations and activity
- Find highlights by color coding
- Get book details and metadata
- Perform full-text search across annotations
Best for
About Apple Books
Apple Books is a community-built MCP server published by vgnshiyer that provides AI assistants with tools and capabilities via the Model Context Protocol. Access your Apple Books library, organize notes, and get personalized book recommendations—just like a genius bar appoin It is categorized under productivity.
How to install
You can install Apple Books in your AI client of choice. Use the install panel on this page to get one-click setup for Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, and other MCP-compatible clients. This server runs locally on your machine via the stdio transport.
License
Apple Books is released under the Apache-2.0 license. This is a permissive open-source license, meaning you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software.
Apple Books MCP
Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Apple Books.
At a glance
- Ask Claude to summarize your recent highlights
- Ask Claude to organize books in your library by genre
- Ask Claude to recommend similar books based on your reading history
- Ask Claude to compare notes from different books read on the same subject
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/77a5a29b-bfd7-4275-a4af-8d6c51a4527e
And much more!
Available Tools
| Tool | Description | Parameters |
|---|---|---|
| list_collections() | List all collections | None |
| get_collection_books(collection_id) | Get all books in a collection | collection_id: str |
| describe_collection(collection_id) | Get details of a collection | collection_id: str |
| list_all_books() | List all books | None |
| get_book_annotations(book_id) | Get all annotations for a book | book_id: str |
| describe_book(book_id) | Get details of a particular book | book_id: str |
| list_all_annotations() | List all annotations | None |
| get_highlights_by_color(color) | Get all highlights by color | color: str |
| search_highlighted_text(text) | Search for highlights by highlighted text | text: str |
| search_notes(note) | Search for notes | note: str |
| full_text_search(text) | Search for annotations containing the given text | text: str |
| recent_annotations() | Get 10 most recent annotations | None |
| describe_annotation(annotation_id) | Get details of an annotation | annotation_id: str |
Installation
Using uv (recommended)
uvx can be used to directly run apple-books-mcp (without installing it).
brew install uv # for macos
uvx apple-books-mcp
Using pip
pip install apple-books-mcp
After installing, you can run the server using:
python -m apple_books_mcp
Configuration
Claude Desktop Setup
Using uvx (recommended)
{
"mcpServers": {
"apple-books-mcp": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [ "apple-books-mcp@latest" ]
}
}
}
Using python
{
"mcpServers": {
"apple-books-mcp": {
"command": "python",
"args": ["-m", "apple_books_mcp"]
}
}
}
Upcoming Features
- add docker support
- add resources support
- edit collections support
- edit highlights support
Contribution
Thank you for considering contributing to this project!
Development
If you cloned this repository, you can test it using Claude Desktop with below configuration:
Use uv venv to create a virtual environment and install the dependencies.
uv venv
uv sync
Debugging
With Claude Desktop
{
"mcpServers": {
"apple-books-mcp": {
"command": "uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"/path/to/apple-books-mcp/",
"run",
"apple_books_mcp",
"-v"
]
}
}
}
With inspector
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uvx apple-books-mcp
Opening Issues
If you encounter a bug, have a feature request, or want to discuss something related to the project, please open an issue on the GitHub repository. When opening an issue, please provide:
Bug Reports: Describe the issue in detail. Include steps to reproduce the bug if possible, along with any error messages or screenshots.
Feature Requests: Clearly explain the new feature you'd like to see added to the project. Provide context on why this feature would be beneficial.
General Discussions: Feel free to start discussions on broader topics related to the project.
Contributing
1️⃣ Fork the GitHub repository https://github.com/vgnshiyer/apple-books-mcp
2️⃣ Create a new branch for your changes (git checkout -b feature/my-new-feature).
3️⃣ Make your changes and test them thoroughly.
4️⃣ Push your changes and open a Pull Request to main.
Please provide a clear title and description of your changes.
License
Apple Books MCP is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.
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