5 Tools to Download any Book from Google and save it as PDF

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. Many popular books are available with Google Book. The books available can be read online only and cannot be downloaded for later use. You can download certain books as pdf that allows public-domain works and are free from copyright protection. Only few books are available with full preview based on agreements with publishers.

 

Following are different tools using which you can download any Google book and save it as PDF file or print it.

1) Google Books Downloader

Google Book Downloader is a tool that allows you to save book as PDF from google to your computer. Before using this tool make sure you have properly installed Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 SP1(Install)

How to use Google Books Downloader?

1. Download Google Books Downloader. Extract or unzip the file. Double click mdgb.exe to run the application.
2. Paste the URL of the book you want to download.
3. Press “Check” button. Book will be checked and all available pages will be retrieved.
4. Press “Download entire book” button to download all the pages in one go.
5. Press “Save entire book as…” button. All downloaded pages will be saved in PDF format.

2) Leechvideo

Visit leechvideo and input URL of the book you searched from Google. Input the URL for the book you want to download and press the ‘Grab’ button. The page retrieval process in the form of image files will start as soon as you press the ‘Grab’ button. Click right mouse button on the links and save it manually one by one. You can use Orbit for batch downloading

3) Greasemonkey script

This is the most powerful and stable way to download Google Book. You can easily download any book from books.google.com using Greasemonkey script. Just follow the simple steps below.

1. This hack only works with firefox browser. Make sure you install firefox browser. 
2. Now install Greasemonkey Script and then install Google book downloader userscript.
3. Install Flashgot to firefox browser and restart your firefox browser.
4. Search any book on books.google.com and you’ll notice a download button at the sidebar as shown in screenshot.
5. Click the download button to download the images of each. Select the pages you wish to download and then right click and select FlashGot Selection to download the selected pages.

4) Laneware.net

Visit laneware. The tool works only on IE browser. Input the URL of the book you wish to download and you will get the links of the pages retrieved. I tried the tool but did not found much success. You can use its ‘FAQ and Help’ section for troubleshooting tips.

5) ClickBook

If you are looking for advance tool that can download google book and can print them for you as well then ClickBook is the best solution for you. The tool does not come free and is available for $49.95. Works only with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista. Visit ClickBook for more details.

6) Download book without using any Tool

1. Open computer with admin privileges and launch your Internet Explorer (Not Firefox). Now visit to the page in books.google.com that you want to download.
2.  Navigate to “C:\Documents and Settings\%admin_name%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\” of your computer machine and delete all of the content of the folder.
3. Browse the pages of the books that you want to download.
4. Open “Temporary Internet Files” folder. Copy all PNG files. These files are nothing but the pages of the scanned book
5. You can print the png files and arrange them in order for reading.

Please share other methods that can be used to extract the books from Google book search service.

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Which Smalltalk?

When starting any project, a developer has to navigate a tree of choices. Which programming language do I choose? Which distribution? Which editor or IDE should I use with it? Which operating system should I target? Sometimes, the decision is easy since the environment is dictated by management: we’re a C# shop, so fire up VisualStudio on Windows and go. Or, we’re using Ruby 1.9, so pick your favorite code editor (TextMate, vim, Emacs, Eclipse) and you’re off, since you’re limited to pretty much one official Ruby distribution. Same with Python, or Perl — pick an editor and your favorite *nix OS (Windows support is more shaky for all these scripting languages), and you’re set. Sure, there are often experimental or alternate VMs and interpreters, but the mainstream production choice is clear.

Not so with Smalltalk. Much like with Lisp, a casual user first approaching the Smalltalk world is faced with a bewildering variety of Smalltalk versions. Which distribution and virtual machine (and therefore a slightly incompatible dialect and set of libraries) should you choose?

Fortunately, a little bit of research narrows down the choices considerably. Especially if you want to use the Seaside web development framework. Essentially, you’re faced with either Cincom’s VisualWorks Smalltalk (for a stable, powerful commercial distribution with corporate support), GemStone’s GLASS platform (Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk, which uses the incredible object-oriented Gemstone database for persistence), or the free open-source Squeak Smalltalk.

Let’s run down the choices that I made in starting this project.

Q: Which programming language? A: Smalltalk
I have worked with Smalltalk for over 9 years, both as my day job (writing desktop applications in Visual Smalltalk and Cincom’s VisualWorks), and as a hobby (exploring Squeak Smalltalk). Though I have also worked on commercial projects using Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby/Rails, I have not found anything in those worlds resembling Smalltalk’s powerful IDE and ease of debugging. Though the other languages enjoy a wider base of developers, open source projects, and third-party library support, the experience of working with Smalltalk (and Seaside) is profound, freeing and satisfying.

Q: Which Smalltalk? A: Squeak
Although the GLASS platform intrigues me, I don’t have much experience with it. And, given a choice, I always prefer to work with open-source technology rather than commercial distributions, hence the choice of Squeak (which I feel has more long-term longevity and openness) over VisualWorks (even though that has better commercial support, I don’t want to deal with license fees at this stage in the project)

Q: But which Squeak? A: The Pharo Project fork
One slight complication is that the Squeak project forked in 2008. Although I’ve worked with “plain Squeak” for a number of years, the Pharo fork seemed like a reasonable choice, since it was chosen to be the reference implementation for the Seaside platform (perfect, exactly what I need it for).

The original reasons that I posted for choosing Pharo were:

a) removing unessential code from Squeak (Squeak, having started as a children’s education project, has accumulated a fair amount of cruft over the years),
b) clearer licensing (MIT license),
c) more frequent updates (think Ubuntu versus Debian), and
d) being a reference implementation for the Seaside platform (perfect, exactly what I need it for).

However, as this thread on Pharo-Project mailing list pointed out, most of them are incorrect. My apologies for misunderstanding — I got those reasons from the Pharo Wikipedia entry when I came across the Pharo fork, and was trying to figure out whether to switch or not.

Q: Which IDE? A: Squeak/Pharo
Unlike most programming languages, the code editor and IDE is often built into the distribution/VM (though the IDE code can be stripped out when getting a VM image ready for deployment). This may sound strange, but it buys you incredible debugging and refactoring powers. Like in Lisp, both the source code and the (on-the-fly) compiled methods and classes are first-class objects, so with a single keystroke, you can do things like “Show me a list of all the methods called from this method” or “Give me a list of all the other places in the code this function is called from” — something that has to be approximated with full-text searches in other IDEs and environments.

Q: Which operating system? A: Doesn’t matter, actually
Both Squeak/Pharo and VisualWorks are cross-platform, with the virtual machine and IDE working almost identically on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Currently, I do development on Windows and Ubuntu Linux (depending on which machine I’m working on), and deploy to a web server running Linux.
I hope this sheds some light on this very individual set of decisions. One last thing I’d like to reiterate: If you’re new to Smalltalk and Seaside, you essentially can’t go wrong with the main 3 distributions (VisualWorks, GLASS or Pharo). All three are excellent cross-platform environments, and the choice between them comes down to commercial support, licensing fees (and, in the case of Gemstone, whether or not you need a first class object-oriented database).

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Free Wordpress hosting giveaway. Too good to be true, but apparently it is true. OMFG.

Who happen to be very generous Wordpress hosters are running a competition that I stumbled upon from my Facebook ads (Finally, FB ads did some good)

You can get your own Wordpress hosting + domain name for one year if you stick to some very trivial conditions you could easily satisfy if you have a blog hosted on the free hosting sites.

Here is the full article: Self-Host Your Blog Giveaway: Win FREE Self-Hosted WordPress Hosting + Domain Name

Let me get this straight for you if you are too bored to go clickety-click.

Prize

1 year Rookie Plan with FREE domain name (1GB space | 5GB/mo bandwidth)

How To Win?

1. Blog about this giveaway and link back to this post. You could take a banner here and insert to your post.
2. Get 7 comments from unique visitors for your post. (Trackback and your own comment aren’t counted)
3. Submit your blog post URL through comment below, along with your name and valid email address in the provided fields.
4. Yippee! You have just won a FREE WordPress hosting plan + a domain name. We will email you further steps to claim the prize within 2 weeks.

This giveaway isn’t a contest. As long as you fulfill all the requirements above, you will be entitled for a free 1 year hosting plan + domain name.

If you are still wondering how are they giving out free hosting accounts like that, the best way would be to go and participate in the contest yourself. Seriously, how difficult is writing a post on something that already is out there :P

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