Google Book Downloader: Download & Save Google Books As PDF Files

Google Books is a good place to search for books, especially when you want to take a preview of the book’s content before you decide to go ahead and buy it. You can browse and read all the preview pages of the non-public domain books. However you may want to get back to some of the material at a later time or like to have it on your PC for offline browsing. Normally you would have to save each of the pages as images manually which is a very time-consuming and painful process.

A small and free utility, Google Book Downloader , lets you automate this job and downloads all the images of the selected book, which it later lets you export as a PDF file to your PC. You have to copy and paste the book’s URL, id or ISBN into the Add Book window from File menu to add it to the download queue. A sample book URL below shows the book id:

http://books.google.com/books?id=9fs5ZUaWSRIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false

You can specify the quality of these images or just let it download at Google’s default quality. Downloading is a bit tricky; first you have to ‘Search’ for the book, then ‘Queue’ it before you choose to ‘Start’ the download from the book’s right click context menu.

Some times download channels are broken and you may have to validate a CAPTCHA image. A bit lengthy process to download a book; however depending on how much you need the book you may still find this utility quite useful. After the download is complete you can export the contents as an iTextSharp PDF file, which can later be read in any PDF reader.

Google Book Downloader also lets you save books which are otherwise not accessible from your country. Google uses geo location to present you with book search results which may omit some books. By searching for the book and downloading it from country-specific servers and IP addresses, Google Book Downloader lets you have any book no matter where you live.
Okawix is a similar utility which lets you download and save Wikipedia articles to your PC.

Download Google Book Downloader
Works with Windows XP, Vista, 7; Requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1