eBook Scraper

A modern browser extension to help you create PDFs from ebooks hosted on supported academic platforms.

Supported Platforms

• JStor
• Ebook Central by ProQuest

Supported Browsers

• Chrome
• Firefox

This extension likely works on most Chromium and Firefox based browsers, though it's only been tested on those above

Usage

1. Navigate to a supported ebook platform (ProQuest, JStor).
2. Open an ebook you want to scrape.
3. Click through each page as they load to capture images.
4. Click the eBook Scraper extension icon in your toolbar.
5. Use the popup interface to save pages and compile your PDF. Enabling OCR will make the text in the PDF selectable, allowing you to copy and highlight it, though it may increase processing time.

Note: Attempting to save very large ebooks may max out your computer's RAM and cause the browser to crash. Consider saving large ebooks in seperate blocks and collate later.

Developer Instructions

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18.0 or higher).

Prepare the Local Environment

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies

   git clone https://github.com/janbaykara/ebook-scraper.git
   cd ebook-scraper
   npm install
   npx wxt-prepare

2. Launch the extension automatically with hot-reloading

   npx wxt                    #Chrome
   npx wxt -b firefox         #Firefox

3. Build files for production

   npx wxt build              #Chrome
   npx wxt build -b firefox   #Firefox
   

Acknowledgements

This project is built using the following open-source libraries:

• WXT
• jsPDF
• Tesseract.js