A python script to download book summaries and audio from Blinkist and generate some pretty output files.
pip install -r requirements.txt
This script uses ChromeDriver to automate the Google Chrome browser - therefore Google Chrome needs to be installed in order to work.
usage: main.py [-h] [--language {de,en}] [--match-language]
[--cooldown COOLDOWN] [--headless] [--audio] [--concat-audio]
[--no-scrape] [--book BOOK] [--category CATEGORY]
[--create-html] [--create-epub] [--create-pdf]
email password
Example with non-optional arguments
positional arguments:
email The email to log into your premium Blinkist account
password The password to log into your premium Blinkist account
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--language {en,de} The language to scrape books in - either 'en' for
english or 'de' for german (default en)
--match-language Skip scraping books if not in the requested language
(not all book are avaible in german, default false)
--cooldown COOLDOWN Seconds to wait between scraping books, and downloading
audio files. Can't be smaller than 1 (default 1)
--headless Start the automated web browser in headless mode. Works
only if you already logged in once (default false)
--audio Download the audio blinks for each book (default true)
--concat-audio Concatenate the audio blinks into a single file and tag
it. Requires ffmpeg (default false)
--no-scrape Don't scrape the website, only process existing json
files in the dump folder (default false)
--book BOOK Scrapes this book only, takes the blinkist url for the
book (e.g. https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/... or
nhttps://www.blinkist.com/en/nc/reader/...)
--book-category BOOK_CATEGORY
When scraping a single book, categorize it under this
category (works with '--book' only)
--categories CATEGORIES [CATEGORIES ...]
Only the categories whose label contains at least one
string here will be scraped. Case-insensitive; use
spaces to separate categories. (e.g. "--categories
entrep market" will only scrape books under
"Entrepreneurship" and "Marketing & Sales")
--ignore-categories IGNORE_CATEGORIES [IGNORE_CATEGORIES ...]
If a category label contains anything in
ignored_categories, books under that category will not
be scraped. Case-insensitive; use spaces to separate
categories. (e.g. "--ignored-categories entrep market"
will skip scraping of "Entrepreneurship" and
"Marketing & Sales")
--create-html Generate a formatted html document for the book (default true)
--create-epub Generate a formatted epub document for the book (default true)
--create-pdf Generate a formatted pdf document for the book.
Requires wkhtmltopdf (default false)
python main.py email password where email and password are the login details to your premium Blinkist account.
The script uses Selenium with a Chrome driver to scrape the site. Blinkist uses captchas on login, so the script will wait for the user to solve it and login on first run (although the email and password fields are filled in automatically from the arguments) - the sessions cookies are stored so the script can be run in headless mode with the appropriate flag afterwards. The output files are stored in the books folder, arranged in subfolders by category and by the book's title and author.
The script builds a nice-looking html version of the book by using the 'book.html' and 'chapter.html' files in the 'templates' folder as a base. Every parameter between curly braces in those files (e.g. {title}) is replaced by the appropriate value from the book metadata (dumped in the dump folder upon scraping), following a 1-to-1 naming convention with the json parameters (.e.g {title} will be replaced by the title parameter, {who_should_read} but the who_should_read one and so on).
The special field {__chapters__} is replaced with all the book's chapters. Chapters are created by parsing each chapter object in the book metadata and using the chapter.html template file in the same fashion, replacing tokens with the parameters inside the chapter object.
Add the --create-pdf argument to the script to generate a .pdf file from the .html one. This requires the wkhtmltopdf tool to be installed and present in the PATH.
The script download audio blinks as well. This is done by waiting for a request to the Blinkist's audio endpoint in their library api for the first chapter's audio blink which is sent as soon as the user navigates to a book's reader page; then re-using the valid request's headers to build additional requests to the rest of the chapter's audio files. The files are downloaded as .m4a.
Add the --concat-audio argument to the script to concatenate the individual audio blinks into a single file and tag it with the appropriate book title and author. This requires the ffmpeg tool to be installed and present in the PATH.
During scraping, the script saves all book's metadata in json files inside the dump folder. Those can be used by the script to re-generate the .html, .epub and .pdf output files without having to scrape the website again. To do so, pass the --no-scrape argument to the script.
- Some people have had troubles when dealing with long generated book files (> 260 characters in Windows). Although this should be handled gracefully by the script, if you keep seeing "FileNotFoundError" when trying to create the .html / .m4a files, try and turn on long filenames support on your system: https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-10/enable-long-file-name-support-windows-10
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