'Bunch of me

First of all, first thing first , from now on I'm going to discontinue my previous 'formal' attitude towards blogging . I've had it with long, arduous and boring blog posts that stresses over and over again the more 'subtle' aspects of the subject in question and experiments with English lit. The NEW ME would post short, possibly humorous posts. These so called 'short stints' would be far more casual and 'regular' ( I must stress ) than before.

Ok, onto the actual jig. The other day I was looking for a way to download "Spell of , an awesome book on the Sundarbans. After a number of nudges here and there, I was left with a few options. The first 'obvious' choice was the Google Book Downloader. Then I found out that I had to install the latest version of the .NET framework which I was somewhat allergic to. So scratch that.

Then I did what I always do when left with no other option with which to exploit/manipulate web-service like "Google Books", turn to Greasemonkey. It turns out that there's a very potent GS script out there (also ironically called Google Book Downloader ) that might help freeloaders like myself to do our bidding. Here's how you can use Greasemonkey and a compatible script to download your favourite book from Google Books :

1) Install Greasemonkey if you haven't already.

2) Install the Google Book Downloader script. Don't worry, this piece of JS-code is fang-less.

3) Browse to the book of your choice in Google Books. A "Download this Book" dialogue (shown below) will become visible. Click that fat, pale button.



4) The dowload will progress (shown below). Once done, you can now download individual pages as .png files or use the FlashGot extension to download all pages at once.




Productivity Tip: If you want to make a nice PDF file out of the image files downloaded, I recommend using doPDF which happens to be an excellent 'anything to pdf converter' and its totally free!

Phew, who knew writing 'small' can be tiresome as well :(

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