O'Reilly

Search O'Reilly books, videos, courses and events from an AI agent.

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What the O'Reilly connector does

The O'Reilly MCP server connects the O'Reilly learning platform's catalog — books, videos, courses, audiobooks and live events — to Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP-compatible agent. The connector Anthropic lists exposes one tool, a keyword search returning metadata and a link rather than book text. Sign-in is OAuth, or a revocable personal access token.

Verified connector

Listed by Anthropic as a partner connector in its Connectors Directory.

Connection checked by Agentman on .

Anthropic states this reflects the level of review a connector received, not a security audit.

O'Reilly tools (1)

  • search_oreilly_content

Tool names from Anthropic's directory listing. This server requires sign-in, so we could not read tool descriptions or parameter schemas.

Limits

  • No scopes exist, in any descriptor. scopes_supported is an empty array in both the RFC 9728 resource descriptor and the authorization server metadata, and the OpenAPI security definition declares an empty scopes object. Nothing at the OAuth grant narrows anything, and a token cannot be scoped down. On a single read-only tool the exposure is small; the mitigation is that tokens are individually revocable.
  • We could not read tool schemas or safety annotations. The endpoint returned HTTP 401 to an anonymous request, so no tools/list response was seen. Everything about the tool's parameters comes from O'Reilly's published specification, not from the server.
  • The listed connector returns no content, only pointers. No excerpt, snippet or full text crosses the wire. An agent cannot answer a technical question from the book — only name the book. Snippet retrieval requires the separately sold Expert MCP server at a different endpoint.
  • Results are capped small by default. O'Reilly documents a default of 5 results and a maximum query length of 500 characters. English is the default language filter, so non-English material is invisible unless languages is set explicitly.
  • Search is keyword, not semantic. O'Reilly describes the tool as a keyword search with results comparable to on-platform search. A conceptual query phrased in the reader's own words may miss material a semantic index would find. ask_oreilly_experts on the paid tier is the answer to that, and it is not in this listing.
  • The licence is stricter than most readers expect. The Membership Agreement of October 9, 2024 forbids transmitting O'Reilly content "as input or a prompt to a machine learning or AI system" without the copyright owner's written permission. Using the connector is fine — it is O'Reilly's own retrieval feature — but pasting O'Reilly text into an agent by other means is not, and the 250-word aggregate quotation limit is not enforced by any tool.
  • No rate limits are published. Neither specification nor the MCP guide mentions throttling, quota or HTTP 429 handling. Limits probably exist and are simply undocumented; plan for unknown ceilings.
  • Whether an agent consumes a seat is unstated. No O'Reilly document addresses automated use against the "personal use only" clause. Treat it as unresolved, not as permitted.
  • The documentation page is invisible to text extractors. O'Reilly's MCP docs render entirely client-side from a Redocly single-page app, and every path under /apidocs/ returns the same shell. A plain fetch of the documented URL yields four words of text; the content lives in OpenAPI documents under a separate /dist/ path that required a real browser to discover. Anything summarising these docs from a simple fetch has read nothing.
  • Two endpoints exist and each source names only one. The directory's content-discovery path and O'Reilly's documented search path are both live with separate resource descriptors, and neither party's documentation acknowledges the other's URL.
  • Entitlement filtering is documented but unverifiable by us. O'Reilly states results are filtered to the token's permissions. We could not test this without credentials and did not try.

Frequently asked questions

Does the O'Reilly MCP server return the text of books?

Not the one Anthropic lists. Its response schema carries title, authors, publisher, page count, a cover image and a link — no field for body text, chapters or excerpts. A separate paid Expert server does return snippet text through a citation tool, but that is a different endpoint requiring a different entitlement.

What OAuth scopes does the O'Reilly MCP server request?

None at all. Both the RFC 9728 resource descriptor and the authorization server metadata declared scopes_supported as an empty array on 2026-08-23, and the OpenAPI security definition declares an empty scopes object too. Three independent declarations agree. Nothing can be granted selectively, which matters less on a single read-only tool.

Do I need an O'Reilly subscription to use the MCP server?

Yes. O'Reilly states that all requests require authentication and that no anonymous requests are permitted, and an anonymous call returned HTTP 401 when we checked on 2026-08-23. O'Reilly's guide describes the Search server as available to all O'Reilly members, so it is a membership benefit rather than a public API.

Does O'Reilly's licence allow feeding its content to an AI model?

Its Membership Agreement forbids it in general terms. Content accessed via the Service may not be stored, reproduced or transmitted, including as input or a prompt to a machine learning or AI system, without written permission from the copyright owner. The MCP server is O'Reilly granting that permission through a controlled product rather than an exception you may assume.

Does O'Reilly allow AI companies to train on its books?

No, and its robots.txt names the crawlers. GPTBot, anthropic-ai, Google-Extended, CCBot and cohere-ai sit under a heading reading AI training scrapers with content access disallowed. The Membership Agreement separately forbids extracting content to train a machine learning or AI system. O'Reilly treats attributed retrieval and model training as different things.

Can the O'Reilly connector change anything in my account?

No. The single listed tool is search_oreilly_content, a keyword search whose documented parameters are all query filters, with no identifier of a record to modify. Nothing creates, updates or deletes. Even the paid Expert server adds only two more read tools, so no O'Reilly MCP surface writes anything at all.

Does calling the O'Reilly MCP server cost money or consume credits?

No single call spends anything metered. O'Reilly publishes no per-call price, credit balance or quota, and the membership you already hold is what grants access. No tool reports usage or billing either, but with nothing consumable per call there is no runaway spend for an agent to cause.

Why do O'Reilly's docs show a different endpoint than the Claude directory?

Because two paths are live. Anthropic's directory registers the content-discovery path while every O'Reilly document gives a search path instead. We confirmed on 2026-08-23 that both return an identical authentication challenge and each publishes its own resource descriptor. Neither redirects to the other, and O'Reilly never mentions the directory's path.

Sources

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