Springer Quarantine Books

Introduction

This is a short python script to download the around 500 books that were provided for free by Springer during the 2020 global Corona lockdown.

The script is based on the search results that you get from the Springer website if you look for the "Covid-19 textbooks". The search results can be downloaded as a .csv file to feed the download_books.py script. Search results obtained on May 2, 2020, are included in the repository, so that the script will run out of the box.

Instructions

Just clone the repository, update the SearchResults.csv file if you want, and run the download_books.py script. It will create one directory per book and attempt to download the pdf and epub file for each book. It can't be further configured at this point.

Notes

1. The EPUB files are not available for all books, so be prepared for some NONE_FOUND status codes for this format.
2. Some books on the list are actually not freely available anymore. The script tries to return the NONFREE_DETECTED status code for these books.
3. The only status code you should worry about is if you see NOT_FOUND for a PDF. This should not happen, as all books in the search results should give you valid URLs, and PDFs are always available

As an alternative to this script, there is also a script written in R on GitHub. It might also be interesting to check out this article, which describes how to download all the PDFs with a simple python script. That article uses the wget python library for the downloads, but my script uses the requests module. According to the article, wget might be much much faster, as they claim to finish the loop in a few minutes versus a much longer time for me. Maybe that's just my slow internet connection.

I will not further work on this script as it already did the job for me, but I'm always happy to receive pull requests!