How to get all the plain text from a Google Books full-view book

google-booksocr

Google Books has a lot of old books that are available for "Full View". And there is an option to see a certain amount of plain text: when you're viewing the page images of an old book, if you click on the gear icon in the upper right and click on "Plain text" in the drop-down menu, you can see the OCR'd plain text for a few pages. But I want to get the plain text for all the pages.

Obviously I could repeatedly copy and paste, but if the book is long, then that process will take many hours, possibly days.

Does anyone know how to get all the plain text?

Best Answer

Download the book as PDF (from the "gear" menu on the book's page in Google Books), and open the file in a PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Apple Preview. From there you can Select All, Copy, and Paste into the word processor of your choice.

You can use a small JavaScript bookmarklet or user script.

A working JavaScript piece of code that I used in the past for multiple sites (adjusted to the current one):

var textArea = document.createElement("textarea");
textArea.style.position = 'fixed';
textArea.style.top = 0;
textArea.style.left = 0;
textArea.style.width = '2em';
textArea.style.height = '2em';
textArea.style.padding = 0;
textArea.style.border = 'none';
textArea.style.outline = 'none';
textArea.style.boxShadow = 'none';
textArea.style.background = 'transparent';
textArea.value = document.location.href.match("https?:\/\/.*?\/books")[0] + "?id=" + document.location.href.match("id=([a-zA-Z0-9]{12})[?&]")[1];
document.body.appendChild(textArea);
textArea.select();

try {
    var successful = document.execCommand('copy');
    var msg = successful ? 'successful' : 'unsuccessful';
    console.log('Copying text command was ' + msg + ': ' + text);
} catch (err) {
    console.log('Oops, unable to copy');
}

document.body.removeChild(textArea);

I just tried it as a booklet and it works great (on Chrome at least).

A bookmarklet ready code (minimized):

javascript:var textArea=document.createElement("textarea");textArea.style.position="fixed",textArea.style.top=0,textArea.style.left=0,textArea.style.width="2em",textArea.style.height="2em",textArea.style.padding=0,textArea.style.border="none",textArea.style.outline="none",textArea.style.boxShadow="none",textArea.style.background="transparent",textArea.value=document.location.href.match("https?://.*?/books")[0]+"?id="+document.location.href.match("id=([a-zA-Z0-9]{12})[?&]")[1],document.body.appendChild(textArea),textArea.select();try{var successful=document.execCommand("copy"),msg=successful?"successful":"unsuccessful";console.log("Copying text command was "+msg+": "+text)}catch(e){console.log("Oops, unable to copy")}document.body.removeChild(textArea);

Side note

It was taken from a user script I created for eBay, to share easily a short and nice link.
If you want, you can look at the full script, which adds a small button to each item page on eBay and adjust it to Google Books.
You can find my script at one of those links: GitHub / OpenUserJS.

Best Answer

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You can use a small JavaScript bookmarklet or user script.

Side note

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