Gutendex vs Vedic Society

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.

The companion API to Rig Veda in Anindita Basu's Indica project, this one is a lexicon rather than a hymn index: it returns Nagari script, transliteration, category (flora, fauna, geography, kinship, and more), and meaning for nouns drawn from Vedic literature, via /words/{word}, /descriptions/{description}, and /categories/{category} endpoints. Like its sibling API, the stored docs URL had moved from a flat /html/vs.html page (now a 404) to the site's restructured /topics/ path; the live keyless backend at indica-1hwj.onrender.com/vs/v2 echoed a live Origin header back on a real /words/ash call, confirming CORS is open rather than unknown.