I love the Obsidian Book Search plugin, but it has an issue…everyone using it shares the same key. That means you can exceed the API connection limit for the day based on the interactions of other users.

Luckily vityav has a fix in a GitHub comment which I applied and works. Today I’ll walk you through the fix.

First you’ll need to get an API key for Google. Visit that link and then click Create Credentials. Then choose API Key from the dropdown.

After a few seconds a window will popup with your API key in it. You should keep this secret as it’s going to let people access your Google account APIs which could cause a security issue. I also recommend that you restrict the API key to Google Book Search at this time.

Now you’ll need to confirm that you have access to the Google Books API. Click through that link and confirm that the API is set to enabled.

Now the final step requires a bit of bravery as we’re going to edit the Obsidian Book Search plugin directly. To do this you’ll need to navigate to your Obsidian vault. If you aren’t sure where it is click the vault button in the lower left side of Obsidian and then the vault will show it’s file path on your computer.

Obsidian keeps all the plugins and settings in a hidden filed. On macOS and Linux that’s in a directory that starts with . and is called .obsidian. To see this on macOS you can press SHIFT ⌘ .. If you’re navigating to the file with a Terminal application then ls -a will list all files.

Then inside the .obsidian folder navigate to plugins/obsidian-book-search-plugin and open main.js in your code editor of choice. Inside main.js we’re looking for the following string: t.langRestrict=o;

After that string we want to add our API key with the following format. t.key="<apikey>";. Then save the file and you are now using your own Google Book Search API key and shouldn’t run into search errors from too many people using the original single key.