Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad (там, tam, "there"), often from smuggled manuscripts.
Tamizdat is a telegram bot that allows you to search flibusta.net library and to deliver the books you want from there to an email address of your choice. The main use-case for that is to send the books from the library to your Kindle device via an Amazon email address.
In order to install the bot from source you need to update the settings stored inside tamizdat/settings.py and then use
$ pip install .
from the project root to set up the environment and put the binary inside your search path.
To run the bot you first need to import the website catalog. You can get it at http://flibusta.is/catalog/catalog.zip. To import it you need to download it and extract it, for example with the help of the following commands
$ wget http://flibusta.is/catalog/catalog.zip
$ unzip catalog.zip
This will create a 60 megabyte text file called catalog.txt in you working directory. To import it simply run
$ tamizdat import catalog.txt
The command will parse the catalog and put all the library information into an sqlite3 database with a search index of the library cards. You are now almost ready to start the bot. But first you have to create an admin user. This can be done by running
$ tamizdat admin <admin_id>
where admin_id is the telegram id of your bot admin. That's it, you can start your bot now. This is done by executing
$ tamizdat bot
Currently, the bot supports the following list of commands:
- settings -- Show the profile settings
- setemail -- Set your email address
- info 000000 -- Show the book info given the id
- download 000000 -- Download the ebook
- email 000000 -- Send the ebook via email