Gutendex vs Rig Veda

Gutendex is a free, open-source JSON API — built independently of Project Gutenberg — that wraps its roughly 75,000 public-domain ebooks with searchable, paginated metadata: authors, subjects, bookshelves, languages, and direct links to every available download format from plain text to EPUB and Kindle. No account or key is needed to query it, and the project's own source enables cross-origin requests from any domain rather than restricting them. Anyone needing sustained high-volume traffic is asked to run their own instance of the open-source server instead of hammering the public one.

Part of Anindita Basu's Indica project, this API fetches structured metadata for every hymn in the Rig Veda Samhita — which mandal and sukta it belongs to, its meter, its poet, and which god(s) it's addressed to — through endpoints like /mandal/{n}, /sungfor/{god}/meters, and /pairs/{god}/{poet}, rather than the hymn text itself. The stored docs URL had moved from a flat /html/rv.html page (now a 404) to a restructured /topics/ path on the same GitHub Pages site; the live backend at indica-1hwj.onrender.com/rv/v3 needs no key and echoed a live Origin header back on both a GET and an OPTIONS preflight. Being a free Render-hosted hobby service, it can take some seconds to wake up from an idle cold start.