Google Play Books downloader for interoperability purposes. Each page is downloaded as an image, it's up to you to build a PDF from them, do OCR, and add metadata.

Why:

• Google Play Books has two reading modes:
  • Flowing text: EPUB file. You can download it from your Google Play Books library, when available.
  • Original Pages: PDF file. Usually provided to Google by the book publisher, or sometimes scanned by Google themselves (where each page is a big image). You can download this PDF from Google Play Books, but only if Google (arbitrarily) decides that its size is small enough.
• The Google Play Reader app isn't available on all platforms (e.g. e-ink tablets) but fortunately you can download an EPUB or a PDF file. You can then read the downloaded book on any platform, provided that it supports the Adobe Digital Editions DRM.
• Problem: Many PDFs are not available for download because Google unilaterally decides that they are “large book files” ( vague term for which they provide no definition). Due to that you can't read the book (that you bought!) on the platform of your choice.

Note: this script only works for books that have the “Original Pages” viewing option.

Prerequisites

• Install Python and Poetry.
• Download and extract the project repository.
• Run poetry install inside the extracted project repository folder in order to download the dependencies.

Usage (PDF download)

• Open google-play-book-downloader-pdf.py and edit the following constants:

  • BOOK_ID: the ID of the book. You can find it in the URL to the book page. Example: BwCMEAAAQBAJ
  • headers/cookies: the headers and cookies that are necessary to send requests on your behalf. Here is how to get them: 1) Go to https://play.google.com/books and log in. 2) Open dev console, network tab. 3) Click on a random link in the page. 4) Right-click on the corresponding request in the dev console and then Copy as cURL. 5) Go to https://curlconverter.com/python/ and paste your clipboard in the input box. 6) From the Python code that was generated just copy the cookies and headers variables and replace them in google-play-downloader-pdf.py.

• Run the script from the repository folder:

poetry run python google-play-book-downloader-pdf.py

You will find the downloaded book pages in the books/[BOOK_ID] folder.

Recommended next steps:

1) Optimize the resulting images:

a) Run pngquant. It does high-quality lossy compression (40-70%) on the PNG images by optimizing the color palette:

    pngquant -fv --ext=.png --skip-if-larger --speed=1 --quality=95-100 *.png

b) (Optional) Run oxipng. It does additional lossless compression (3-5%) on the PNG images produced by pngquant:

    oxipng --dir . --strip safe --interlace 0 -o 4 *.png

2) Build a PDF

This command will merge all the pages into a PDF, add metadata (book title, date, authors, etc.), and a table of contents.

Run the following command (replace [BOOK_ID] with the ID of the book):

```shell
poetry run play-book-pdf-build books/[BOOK_ID]
```

3) OCR and optimize the PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro:

a) Open the PDF.

b) [Menu] Tools → Scan → OCR.

c) [Scan & OCR toolbar] → Settings:

• Tick All pages.

• Set Document Language to the correct one (e.g. English).

• Set Output to Searchable Image (Exact) (important!).

• Press OK.

  d) [Scan & OCR toolbar] → Recognize Text.

  e) [Menu] File → Save as Other → Optimized PDF….

• Untick everything, except section [Cleanup].

• Section [Cleanup]

  • Tick Optimize the PDF for fast web view and untick everything else. This option makes Adobe Acrobat reorganize the structure of the PDF to be linear. This enables PDF viewers to quickly display the PDF while it's still downloading in the background.
  • Set Object compression options to Leave compression unchanged.

• Click on OK.

Usage (EPUB download)

There is an extremely experimental EPUB downloader in the project as well. For now it just downloads all the pages of a given book in the HTML format and embeds all the resources (images, fonts, etc.) directly in the HTML files as base64. EPUB is not reconstructed yet.

No support yet as it's experimental! Please don't open issues on GitHub regarding the EPUB downloader.

• First run the PDF download for the book (mandatory). See the section above on how to do that.

• Open google-play-book-downloader-epub.py and edit the following constants:

  • BOOK_ID: the ID of the book. You can find it in the URL to the book page. Example: BwCMEAAAQBAJ
  • headers/cookies: the headers and cookies that are necessary to send requests on your behalf. Here is how to get them: 1) Go to https://play.google.com/books and log in. 2) Open dev console, network tab. 3) Click on a random link in the page. 4) Right-click on the corresponding request in the dev console and then Copy as cURL. 5) Go to https://curlconverter.com/python/ and paste your clipboard in the input box. 6) From the Python code that was generated just copy the cookies and headers variables and replace them in google-play-downloader-epub.py.

• Run the script from the repository folder:

poetry run python google-play-book-downloader-epub.py

You will find the downloaded book pages as HTML in the books/[BOOK_ID]/segments folder. The output is very crude and EPUBs are not reconstructed.