Apple Books MCP
Talk to your Apple Books library with Claude
54 followers
Talk to your Apple Books library with Claude
54 followers
Your Apple Books library holds thousands of highlights — what you've underlined, what you've wondered, what you've finished and abandoned. Apple Books MCP is a reading copilot. It gives Claude direct access to your books, highlights, chapters, and reading progress. "Pick up where I left off — walk me back into last night's chapter" "Summarize my highlights from this week" "What am I in the middle of, and what's collecting dust?" Local-first. Open source. Made for readers.
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
Maker here. I built Apple Books MCP because I was tired of my reading being invisible to me.
I highlight a lot — nearly 9,000 passages across ~90 books. But those highlights live in the Apple Books app, and once you underline something, it essentially disappears. You can't ask "what have I been thinking about this week?" You can't pull up a quote you vaguely remember. You can't have a conversation about a book with anything that actually knows what caught your attention in it.
Claude + MCP changes that. This server exposes your whole Apple Books library — books, highlights, notes, reading progress, genres, and (new in v0.7.0) chapter text itself — so you can ask Claude real questions:
"Summarize what I've highlighted this week"
"What am I in the middle of reading, and what's collecting dust?"
"Pick up where I left off — walk me back into the chapter I was reading last night"
"Find everywhere in my library Dawkins wrote about kin selection"
The magic isn't any single query — it's that your reading becomes a surface you can talk to. Claude doesn't forget which books you've engaged with or what themes you circle.
A few things I care about:
Local-first: nothing leaves your machine. Your data stays in Apple Books' SQLite files, which this server reads (never writes).
Open source (Apache 2.0, GitHub)
Listed on MCP Registry and installable via uvx apple-books-mcp
What's next: PDF content access (it's EPUB-only for now), paragraph-level grounding for highlights (so quoted context snaps to paragraph boundaries instead of character windows), and a one-click "resume reading" prompt for whatever book is open.
Long-term I want this to feel like reading side-by-side with someone who's read every book on your shelf.
Would love to hear what questions you'd ask your library. Happy to answer anything about the architecture (MCP tools vs. resources vs. prompts was a fun design space) or the roadmap.
Thanks for checking it out 📚
— Vignesh
Raycast
@vgnshiyer pretty cool! Didn't realize people use Apple Books!
@chrismessina I don't know why. Its great.
It's has a premium feel.
It syncs perfectly across all apple devices. (I open the same page same book on my phone, from my last reading on my iPad)
It allows importing epubs.
Love indie MCPs for personal data. I've wanted something like this for
my Kindle highlights for a while , it's wild how much of our own
reading and saving is locked behind proprietary apps with no query
layer on top. Did you run into any weird Apple Books schema stuff
building this, or was it surprisingly clean?
@linoy_bar_gal you are right. It was not straight forward. I had to find the .sqlite DB hidden in the ~/Applications folder to get the data. I wrote a Python API for it to power this mcp. https://github.com/vgnshiyer/py-apple-books For your reference. Good luck building this for Kindle. :D
Quick update — just added a 60-second demo showing what this actually looks like with a real Apple Books library. If the written pitch didn't quite land, the video might.