NOTE: This script is apparently against the licensing contract between universities and Springer, see: http://www.bib.hm.edu/aktuelles/news/newsdetail_9984.de.html
NOTE 2: I do not maintain this script anymore. Please look for an alternative.
Seems like quite some people are interested in my bash script for downloading ebooks from http://springerlink.com.
That script has some quirks, the greatest of all that it was written in bash which makes it kind of hard to implement new features. And one which was requested was support for books which span multiple pages on SpringerLink.
So here I present springer_download.py - a Python rewrite which should handle all the old links and some more. This is the very first program I’ve written in Python. And since it has to run on the Zedat servers it’s limited to Python 2.4.x without any fancy shmancy additions (a pity, since I’d love to use urlgrabber or pycurl).
the script
You can find the sources on GitHub: http://milianw.github.com/springer_download/
I plan to put all my future code snippets in public repositories on GitHub. That way you can easily track changes and stay up to date. GitHub also has a nice “download” feature which you can use to get the current version. You can find my profile and my repositories at http://github.com/milianw
Note: This script is intended to be run under Linux or other *nix’es which fulfill the requirements (Python 2.4.x, iconv and pdftk). Windows is not supported.
TODO
- introduce multithreading for faster / simultaneous downloads
- add speed to progressbar
- use progressbar in source-downloader
- use one git-repo per project (makes links work properly)
