blinkist-scraper
A python script to download book summaries and audio from Blinkist and generate some pretty output files.
Installation / Requirements
Make sure you're in your virtual environment of choice, then run
poetry install --no-devif you have Poetry installedpip install -r requirements.txtotherwise
This script uses ChromeDriver to automate the Google Chrome browser - therefore Google Chrome needs to be installed in order to work.
The script will automatically try to download and use the appropriate chromedriver distribution for your OS and Chrome version. If this doesn't work, download the right version for you from https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads and use the --chromedriver argument to specify its path at runtime.
Usage
usage: blinkistscraper [-h] [--language {en,de}] [--match-language]
[--cooldown COOLDOWN] [--headless] [--audio]
[--concat-audio] [--keep-noncat] [--no-scrape]
[--book BOOK] [--daily-book] [--books BOOKS]
[--book-category BOOK_CATEGORY]
[--categories CATEGORIES [CATEGORIES ...]]
[--ignore-categories IGNORE_CATEGORIES [IGNORE_CATEGORIES ...]]
[--create-html] [--create-epub] [--create-pdf]
[--save-cover] [--embed-cover-art]
[--chromedriver CHROMEDRIVER] [--no-ublock] [--no-sandbox] [-v]
email password
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
--match-language Skip scraping books if not in the requested language
(not all book are avaible in german)
--cooldown COOLDOWN Seconds to wait between scraping books, and
downloading audio files. Can't be smaller than 1
--headless Start the automated web browser in headless mode.
Works only if you already logged in once
--audio Download the audio blinks for each book.
--concat-audio Concatenate the audio blinks into a single file and
tag it. Requires ffmpeg
--keep-noncat Keep the individual blink audio files, instead of
deleting them (works with '--concat-audio' only)
--no-scrape Don't scrape the website, only process existing json
files in the dump folder. Do not provide email or
password with this option.
--book BOOK Scrapes this book only, takes the Blinkist URL for the
book (e.g. https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/... or
https://www.blinkist.com/en/nc/reader/...)
--daily-book Scrapes the free daily book only.
--books BOOKS Scrapes the list of books, takes a txt file with the
list of Blinkist URL's for the books (e.g.
https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/... or
https://www.blinkist.com/en/nc/reader/...)
--book-category BOOK_CATEGORY
When scraping a single book, categorize it under this
category (works with '--book' and '--daily-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
--create-epub Generate a formatted epub document for the book
--create-pdf Generate a formatted pdf document for the book.
Requires wkhtmltopdf
--save-cover Save a copy of the Blink cover artwork in the folder
--embed-cover-art Embed the Blink cover artwork into the concatenated
audio file (works with '--concat-audio' only)
--chromedriver CHROMEDRIVER
Path to a specific chromedriver executable instead of
the built-in one
--no-ublock Disable the uBlock Chrome extension. This will
completely skip the installation (and setup) of
ublock. If you want to use ublock content blocking, then
run the script again without this flag.
--no-sandbox When running as root (e.g. in Docker), Chrome requires
the '--no-sandbox' argument
-v, --verbose Increases logging verbosity
Basic usage
python blinkistscraper 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 automatically using the provided credentials. Sometimes during scraping, a captcha block-page will appear. When this happens, the script will try to pause and wait for the user to solve it. After some time (i.e. one minute), the script will time out.
The output files are stored in the books folder, arranged in subfolders by category and by the book's title and author.
Customizing HTML output
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.
Generating .pdf
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.
Downloading audio
The script download audio blinks as well when adding the --audio argument. 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.
Concatenating audio files
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. Doing this will delete all individual blinks and replace them with one audio file (per book), only. To keep both the individual blink audio files, also, use the --keep-noncat argument together with the --concat-audio argument (i.e. --concat-audio --keep-noncat). This requires the ffmpeg tool to be installed and present in the PATH.
Processing book dumps with no scraping
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 without providing an email or a password.
Scraping with a free account
If you don't have a Blinkist premium account, you can still scrape the free daily book. To do so automatically, pass the --daily-book argument - this behaves like scraping a single book.
Quirks & known Bugs
- 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, and make sure you have a recent distribution of ffmpeg if using it (old versions had some bugs in dealing with long filenames)
Support 
If this tool has proven useful to you, consider buying me a coffee to support development of this and many other projects.