Apple Books MCP

Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Apple Books.

At a glance

• Pick up where you left off — Claude sees the book you're reading, your progress and the chapter you're on, and pulls that chapter's text and your highlights when it needs them.
• Expand on any highlight — get the surrounding paragraph explained in context, with the exact anchor you marked shown in «...».
• Revisit a book — pull your highlights, cluster them by theme, and quote you back to yourself.
• Reflect on your reading — patterns across books, recurring ideas in your highlights, what you're actually drawn to.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/77a5a29b-bfd7-4275-a4af-8d6c51a4527e

And much more!

Available Tools

List and search tools return one page at a time: 50 annotations or 200 books by default, limit between 1 and 500, and offset for the next page. When there is more, the output says so and names the next offset.

Collections

Editing collections (opt-in)

Off by default. Enable by adding --enable-writes to the server args:

"args": ["apple-books-mcp", "--enable-writes"]

Apple provides no automation API for collections, so these write directly to the library database — behind guard rails: every write refuses while Books is open, takes an automatic WAL-safe backup first (~/.py_apple_books/backups/), validates the schema and aborts on drift, and only touches user-created collections (plus "Want to Read" membership). Deleting a collection never deletes the books in it.

⚠️ If iCloud sync for collections is enabled, direct edits may not propagate to other devices and can be reverted by a cloud re-sync.

Books

Reading Status

Annotations

Library Stats

Book Content

Only works for non-DRM EPUBs (imported books, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, etc.). Apple Books Store purchases are FairPlay-protected and return a clear error. iCloud-only books return a "not downloaded" hint.

Available Resources

Attachable data objects accessible from Claude Desktop's resource picker.

Available Prompts

One-click workflows, accessible from Claude Desktop's prompt picker.

Installation

Using uv (recommended)

uvx runs apple-books-mcp without a separate install step.

brew install uv  # for macos
uvx apple-books-mcp --version

The first run downloads about 14 MB of dependencies and can take up to a minute, which is close to how long Claude waits for a server to start. Running the command above once in Terminal warms uv's cache before you add the server to Claude. --version prints the apple-books-mcp, mcp and py-apple-books versions uvx resolved.

Using pip

Needs Python 3.10 or newer (the python3 that ships with macOS is 3.9). Install into a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/apple-books-mcp
~/.venvs/apple-books-mcp/bin/pip install apple-books-mcp
~/.venvs/apple-books-mcp/bin/apple-books-mcp --version

Upgrade later with ~/.venvs/apple-books-mcp/bin/pip install -U apple-books-mcp.

Using Docker (deprecated)

⚠️ The Docker image is deprecated and only partly works: a Linux container can't be granted the macOS permission, can't reach book files stored in iCloud Drive (so the tools that read book text fail), and can't tell whether Books is running (so collection writes are unsupported). Use uvx instead.

It can still serve library metadata and annotations. Mount the Apple Books container read-only and keep stdin open with -i:

docker run -i --rm -v ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents:/root/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents:ro ghcr.io/vgnshiyer/apple-books-mcp:latest

In a Claude config, spell out your home directory: Claude doesn't expand ~.

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apple-books-mcp": {
            "command": "docker",
            "args": [
                "run", "-i", "--rm",
                "-v", "/Users/YOU/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents:/root/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents:ro",
                "ghcr.io/vgnshiyer/apple-books-mcp:latest"
            ]
        }
    }
}

First-run permission prompt (macOS)

The first time the server reads your library, macOS asks whether the program that started it may "access data from other apps", because Apple Books keeps its library in its own app container (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/). Click Allow.

macOS asks about the program Claude launches, not about apple-books-mcp itself:

• uvx with the recommended Claude Desktop config (the prompt above);
• the Python interpreter with the pip config;
• claude when the server is configured in Claude Code;
• your terminal app when you run the server by hand.

The permission belongs to that program, so anything else it launches can use it too. apple-books-mcp only reads the library, plus the book files for chapter text; it changes nothing unless you pass --enable-writes.

Asked again after an update? Homebrew's uv/uvx and Homebrew or uv-managed Python builds aren't signed by a registered developer, so after brew upgrade uv (or a Python upgrade) macOS treats them as a new program and asks again. Click Allow.

Clicked "Don't Allow"? Tools then fail with "macOS denied access to the Apple Books library". (Older releases failed at startup instead, with "No sqlite files found in … Please open Apple Books at least once".) This permission has no switch in System Settings. To be asked again, run:

tccutil reset SystemPolicyAppData

This clears the "data from other apps" decisions for all apps. Then quit and reopen Claude, and click Allow. Adding the program (e.g. /opt/homebrew/bin/uvx) to Full Disk Access in System Settings > Privacy & Security also works, but grants far more access.

Configuration

Claude Desktop Setup

Quit Claude Desktop (Cmd+Q) before editing ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json: Desktop rewrites the file while it runs, so edits made while it's open can be lost.

Using uvx (recommended)

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apple-books-mcp": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": [ "apple-books-mcp" ]
        }
    }
}

Plain apple-books-mcp still picks up new releases: uv checks PyPI for a newer version whenever its cached copy of the package index is more than 10 minutes old, which is usually the case when Claude starts. apple-books-mcp@latest gains nothing over that and makes uv build a fresh environment on every launch (3–12 s instead of about 1 s).

Faster or offline startup

Because uvx checks PyPI at launch, the server won't start while PyPI is unreachable. To avoid that:

• Run uv tool install apple-books-mcp once. The same uvx config then uses the installed copy and starts in about a second without contacting PyPI. Installed copies don't update themselves: run uv tool upgrade apple-books-mcp to get new releases.
• Or use "args": ["--offline", "apple-books-mcp"] to run whatever version uv has already cached (after at least one online run), without any network access.

Using pip

Point Claude at the script inside the virtual environment from Using pip, with your home directory spelled out:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apple-books-mcp": {
            "command": "/Users/YOU/.venvs/apple-books-mcp/bin/apple-books-mcp"
        }
    }
}

Claude Code Setup

Claude Code doesn't read the Claude Desktop config. Add the server with:

claude mcp add --scope user apple-books-mcp -- uvx apple-books-mcp

and check it with /mcp.

Troubleshooting

Where to look

• ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-apple-books-mcp.log (named after your mcpServers key) has the server's own output, including Python tracebacks. For more detail, add "-v" to the args: the server then logs its version, the mcp and py-apple-books versions it runs with, and each request.
• ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp.log lists failures. Its "Server started and connected successfully" line only means the process was launched, not that it works.
• ~/Library/Logs/Claude/main.log records "Connected to apple-books-mcp (N tools)" when a Claude Code or Cowork session in Desktop loaded the tools.
• uvx apple-books-mcp --version in Terminal shows which versions uvx resolves.

Common problems

• "Connection closed", "Server disconnected" or "Server transport closed unexpectedly": the server exited at startup. Read the last error in the traceback in mcp-server-apple-books-mcp.log.
  • No module named 'mcp.server.fastmcp': uv picked an apple-books-mcp release older than 0.8.1 together with mcp 2.x, which removed the API those releases were built on (on Python 3.12 and older, uvx could even fall back to 0.1.2). 0.8.1 and newer work with Python 3.10+ and stay on mcp 1.x. Run uv cache clean apple-books-mcp, check that uvx apple-books-mcp --version reports 0.8.1 or newer, then quit and reopen Claude.
  • A No module named 'server' error in front of the real one is noise from releases before 0.8.4.
• "Not ready after 60 seconds" or "Request timed out" at startup: the first launch was still downloading and installing dependencies. Run uvx apple-books-mcp --version once in Terminal, then reopen Claude.
• "macOS denied access to the Apple Books library" (older releases: "No sqlite files found in …"): see First-run permission prompt.
• "No Apple Books library store found": Apple Books hasn't created its library for this macOS user yet. Open Books once, then try again.
• The server stopped answering after you stopped a response: before 0.8.4, cancelling a tool call that was waiting behind a slow one could shut the server down. Update, then restart Claude.
• "Extension apple-books-mcp not found in installed extensions" in main.log is harmless.

Getting Claude to retry

• Claude Desktop chats: quit Claude completely (Cmd+Q) and reopen it. A server that failed to start isn't retried otherwise.
• Claude Code and Cowork sessions in Desktop: start a new session; each new session retries the server.
• Claude Code: run /mcp and reconnect apple-books-mcp, or restart Claude Code.

Upcoming Features

• PDF content access (currently EPUB-only)
• fuller annotation context via CFI → paragraph resolution

Contribution

Thank you for considering contributing to this project!

Development

Clone the repository and let uv create the virtual environment and install the package with its dependencies:

uv sync
uv run apple-books-mcp --version
uv run pytest

Debugging

Logs go to stderr, which Claude Desktop writes to ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-<name>.log. Without flags the server logs only warnings and errors; -v adds startup details (versions, whether writes are enabled) and a line per request; -vv adds debug output from the MCP SDK.

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 uv --directory /path/to/apple-books-mcp run 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.