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EGW Downloader

A command-line tool to download and convert books from the Ellen G. White Estate website into high-quality PDFs. For books that don't have official PDF downloads available, this script assembles them from the web content while preserving proper formatting and adding metadata.

Features

  • Downloads and converts books that don't have official PDF versions
  • Downloads official PDFs when available
  • Adds book cover images (generates placeholder covers if none available)
  • Includes proper page breaks and table of contents
  • Adds comprehensive metadata to generated PDFs
  • Handles duplicate pages automatically
  • Polite to the server with built-in rate limiting
  • Supports books with special characters in titles

Prerequisites

The following dependencies must be installed:

  • curl - For downloading web content
  • exiftool - For adding PDF metadata
  • wkhtmltopdf - For HTML to PDF conversion
  • xidel - For HTML parsing

Important Notes:

Usage

egw-downloader <book_id> [output_directory]

Parameters:

  • book_id: Required. The ID number from the book's URL
  • output_directory: Optional. Where to save the generated PDF (defaults to ~/Downloads/egw-downloader)

How to Find Book ID

Get the Book ID from the mobile URL of the book. For example:

https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/133/info
                                  ^^^
                              Book ID is 133

Output

The script generates a PDF file with:

  • Book cover (or generated placeholder)
  • Table of contents
  • Properly formatted content
  • Page numbers
  • Complete metadata (title, author, description)

The output filename follows the format: <book_code> - <title>.pdf

Pre-downloaded Books

To avoid unnecessary load on the Ellen G. White servers, many books have been pre-downloaded and archived. You can find them at: Archive.org - Ellen G. White Collection

Examples

Download a specific book to the default location:

egw-downloader 133

Download to a custom directory:

egw-downloader 133 ~/Documents/egw-books