booksnake

Booksnake is a tool to search the web for ebooks and automagically send them to your Kindle (or email), all as simply as possible.

NOTE: Please only use booksnake for legal download of public-domain resources!

Pull-requests and GitHub Issues are always welcome!

Installation

Spin up your favorite terminal, and boop this puppy right up in there:

pip install booksnake

Q.E.D. wut up

Setup

This step is entirely optional, but if you don't want to have to specify --to_email, --from_email, and then type your email password every time you send, then you can add the following to a ~/.booksnakerc:

{
    "from_email": "you@gmail.com",
    "smtp_password": "your gmail password",
    "to_email": "you@free.kindle.com"
}

If you don't feel comfortable leaving your password in plaintext in your home directory (and I can't possibly imagine why that would be!), you can omit that keyvalue pair and enter it at runtime.

You may also choose, like I did, to make a standalone gmail for just this purpose, and then the password is a moot point.

Make sure that regardless of which email you use, you have added it to your Authorized Senders in Amazon's Kindle settings, or else Amazon will refuse to send your documents to your device.

Usage

Searching for, downloading, and sending a book

booksnake --query "Moby Dick"

Sending a book from a known URL

booksnake --url "http://mobydick.com/mobydick.mobi"

Sending a book from a local file:

booksnake --file "~/books/mobydick.mobi"

Advanced Usage

Converting Files

If you're a hacking wizard and you have Amazon's kindlegen installed, you may be able to convert some subset of epubs and pdfs to mobi, and send those to your kindle as well. As long as kindlegen is callable globally (e.g. you've put it in /usr/bin or somesuch), there's no difference in how you call booksnake:

booksnake --file "~/books/mobydick.epub"

Preventing Sends, or Keeping Files

If you want to prevent booksnake from deleting the files after downloading and sending, you can pass the --keep flag:

booksnake --keep --query "Great Expectations"

You can combine this with --no-send if you want to only download and convert the file, and not send it:

booksnake --keep --no-send --query "Great Expectations"