Blinkist M4A Downloader

What is Blinkist.com

• Listen to key ideas from the world's best non-fiction books in just 15 minutes.

Requirements

• Golang 1.10.2 or higher.
• Blinkist (https://www.blinkist.com) Premium account.
• Roughly 25 GB of free disk space.
• wget installed and setup in PATH

Configuration

Enter your username and password in:

1. blinkist/main.go, lines #16, #17.
2. download/download.go, lines #17, #18.

Application

• Run go run main.go inside blinkist/ folder to produce books_urls.txt, the list of unduplicated URLs of all of the books.
• Run go run download.go inside download/ folder to start downloading audio files from the above URLs. books_urls.txt must be present in the download/ folder!

Technical details of the solution

1. Look for HTML tag data-book-id e.g."5c28f2fc6cee070008e7a3d7" in each book URL.

2. Look for all HTML tags data-chapterNo e.g."1" and corresponding data-chapterId e.g."5c28f3296cee070007b46369" (both on the same line) from each book URL.

3. Construct this API link to get the short-lived download link: https://www.blinkist.com/api/books/<data-book-id>/chapters/<data-chapterId>/audio. (e.g.https://www.blinkist.com/api/books/5c28f2fc6cee070008e7a3d7/chapters/5c28f3296cee070007b46369/audio).

4. Read the output for each book chapter, e.g.:

   {"url":"https://abcdefgh12345.cloudfront.net/5c28f2fc6cee070008e7a3d7/5c28f3296cee070007b46369.m4a?Expires=1234567890\u0026Signature=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234-567890abcde-fghi~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-abcd~abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234-567890abcde~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-567890abcde__\u0026Key-Pair-Id=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST"}

5. If the book contains audio (the previous step returns something), create a folder based on JavaScript tag e.g."reader:book:title:changed", "Bad Blood" on the local drive.

6. Decode to proper URL, (replace \u0026 with &), e.g.: https://abcdefgh12345.cloudfront.net/5c28f2fc6cee070008e7a3d7/5c28f3296cee070007b46369.m4a?Expires=1234567890&Signature=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234-567890abcde-fghi~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-abcd~abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234-567890abcde~jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-jklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefgh-567890abcde__&Key-Pair-Id=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST

7. Download the chapter using the above link as the m4a file. Filename will be based on data-chapterNo and stored in the book title folder, e.g.: Bad Blood/000.m4a, Bad Blood/001.m4a, Bad Blood/002.m4a,... .

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