Books for Agents

An open source knowledge base of structured book summaries, optimized for consumption by LLMs and AI agents via MCP (Model Context Protocol).

Any AI agent can connect and retrieve book knowledge to enrich its responses.

How it works

User: "Help me influence people at work"
    ↓
Agent queries Books for Agents via MCP
    ↓
Finds "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
    ↓
Uses structured knowledge in its response

Available books

| Category | Books | |----------|-------| | Business | How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Lean Startup | | Psychology | Thinking Fast and Slow, Atomic Habits | | Technology | The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code | | Self-Improvement | Deep Work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People |

8 books available + 22 in the backlog waiting for contributors.

Installation

Remote server (recommended)

No install needed. The server is deployed on Cloudflare Workers:

https://booksforagents.com/mcp

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "books-for-agents": {
      "url": "https://booksforagents.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add books-for-agents --transport http https://booksforagents.com/mcp

Cursor

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "books-for-agents": {
      "url": "https://booksforagents.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Local server (stdio)

For local development or offline use:

npx books-for-agents

Or clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/danpalmieri/books-for-agents.git
cd books-for-agents
npm install && npm run build

Then add to your MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "books-for-agents": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "books-for-agents"]
    }
  }
}

Available tools

Reading

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | search_books | Search by topic, keyword, or question. Supports category filtering. | | get_book | Get full summary by slug or title (partial match). | | get_book_section | Get a specific section (ideas, frameworks, quotes, connections, when-to-use) to save tokens. | | list_categories | List all categories with book counts. |

Contributing

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | list_backlog | See all pending books and their status. | | generate_book | Get template, example, and metadata to generate the next book summary. | | submit_book | Submit a generated summary as a GitHub Issue for review. |

MCP Resources

• books://catalog — Full catalog with metadata for all books
• books://{slug} — Full summary of a specific book

How to contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed guidelines.

Donate Your Tokens

If you already have Books for Agents connected to your agent, just ask:

"Generate the next book from the backlog"

Your agent will call generate_book to get the context, generate the summary with its own tokens, and submit_book to create a GitHub Issue automatically. No cloning or setup needed.

Write manually

1. Fork the repository
2. Copy books/_template.md to the correct category
3. Write the summary following the template
4. Run npm run validate to check
5. Open a PR

Deploy your own

The project deploys to Cloudflare Workers. Book .md files are bundled into JSON at build time.

git clone https://github.com/danpalmieri/books-for-agents.git
cd books-for-agents
npm install
npm run deploy

For the submit_book tool to work, configure the GitHub token:

npx wrangler secret put GITHUB_TOKEN

For local development:

npm run build:data
npm run dev:worker

Licenses

• Code: MIT
• Book content: CC BY-SA 4.0

The summaries are original analyses and structured insights, not copies of copyrighted content.

Community

Daniel Palmieri — @dlpalmieri