ghacks Technology News
  • Author: Martin
  • Wednesday June 16, 2010

Download Google Books

Google Books offers a vast library of books and magazines. Some books and magazines are provided as full digital copies that can be read online while others are only available as previews or summaries.

Download options are not provided on Google Books which leaves users with no other choice than to read the books and magazines online or use a third party tool to download them to the local computer.

We reviewed the Google Books Downloader back in 2009. The now defunct tool offered an option to download any available book or magazine from Google Books.

A working alternative is the Google Book Downloader userscript which integrates nicely into the website. The extension places a Download this book button in the left upper corner. A click on that button will generate download links for all pages of the selected book or magazine.

google books downloader

google books downloader

Download links are also provided for each page of the magazine or book individually on the right side of the image. The links will open the image in a new browser window by default.

This process is obviously not suitable for downloading books with hundreds of pages. That’s where an extension like DownThemAll for Firefox comes in handy. The extension will recognize the image links that have been generated by the userscript so that they all can be downloaded at once to the computer.

download google books

download google books

The combination of the userscript and the download manager is a good solution for users who want to download pages or entire books and magazines from Google Books.

The userscript is not working in Google Chrome in its current form.

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Related Articles:

Google Books Downloader
Download Google Books For Offline Reading
Read Magazines At Google Book Search
1 Million Public Domain Books Added To Google Books
Google Books Rolls Out New Features

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Categories:Google, The Web, firefox



Responses so far:

  1. ghostwind says:

    this works great, but it doesn’t seem to order the pages correctly.

  2. Hi, Google Book Downloader userscript was working for me the other week but has stopped, is Google blocking it or something?

  3. iskybaush says:

    So, I just had this idea:

    Notice that you can download pages *outside* the limited preview, if you know what to search, as it’ll reveal the surrounding text:

    http://books.google.com.br/books?id=w3vZaFoaa3EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=space+between+words&hl=pt-BR&ei=vTY_TL_YKsGqlAfF1cWdBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=summa&f=false

    Therefore, one could write a script that, after downloading the limited preview pages, searches for words from this limited preview ( as they’ll probably be repeated later ) and then downloads the new content obtained in this way.

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