Google Books downloader for Ubuntu

Thanks to @Glutanimate for his comment to the OP.

getxbook makes a good case for why it is the best option available. I just installed it and used it to download this book with success.

getxbook comes with installation instructions (in the INSTALL file). Once installed, it is run as follows:

$ getxbookgui

Alternatively, the command

$ getgbook book-id

can be used. (The book ID is in the URL for the book. For example, the ID for the book I downloaded is 3pK1-LxtFV4C.)

If only a subset of pages is desired, use

$ getgbook -n book-id

And then enter the pages you want, one at a time, e.g.:

$ getgbook -n book-id
262

When I said the book was downloaded with success, I wasn't being totally honest. For some reason, getxbook missed a few pages that were available in the preview. To get these, I followed these instructions.

Note that the book is downloaded to a sub-directory of the current directory named with the book ID. It is downloaded as a set of .png and/or .jpg files, one per page. These can be converted to .pdf format as follows (after converting the .jpg files to .png files one by one):

$ convert *.png book.pdf

Note that if you intend to print this .pdf on paper, you may need to resize some of the individual images (so that they're all roughly the same size) before converting to the .pdf. I used gimp to do this.

There is a Python program called PySheng than did the job for me.

It's available on Github at https://github.com/tokland/pysheng

You can run the following commands to install it.

git clone https://github.com/tokland/pysheng
cd pysheng
sudo python setup.py install

Now PySheng will be available from the Termainl.

You can run pysheng-gui and pysheng from the terminal for the GUI and terminal version respectively.

pysheng-gui