Elsevier and Springer have made available free books because of the COVID-19 pandemia. This script makes easy to search for books and to download them

Python 3 is needed. Installation is as easy as downloading the script and having installed the following modules:

• pandas
• urllib3
• beautifulsoup4

The script has fundamentally two uses:

In order to search a book, the instruction is:

python free-books.py -s '.*Artificial.*'

Then, the script return the following lines:

Searching for books that match the regular expression...

* Elsevier matches:

                                  Book Title  Year          Imprint
11  Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis  1998  Morgan Kaufmann

* Springer matches:

                                  Book Title  Copyright Year          Author
301  Introduction to Artificial Intelligence            2017  Wolfgang Ertel

Once we know the index of the book we want to download, we only have to use the instruction as follows:

python free-books.py -d s301 e11

If the index starts with an s, then the books comes from the Springer library. If the index starts with an e, then the books comes from the Elsevier library. As Elsevier has a strong security system, instead of downloading the book, the system will print the URL to the book.

It downloads all the files to the output/ folder

Also, patata.