Kobo store price comparisons

[chrisridd]

I wrote a little perl script to help me find which Kobo "country" store gives the cheapest prices for a book. It might be helpful to others.

GitHub gist

To use it, find the book you're interested in on the store, and pass the entire URL to the script. e.g.

kobocompare https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/alliance-rising-1

and wait a little bit.

I've hardcoded a set of currency conversions to GBP, which obviously could be improved by someone. Equally obviously it could check each store in parallel instead of one at a time. Patches welcome, as they say.

[Cootey]

That seems handy, but don’t you require a separate account for each Kobo store? I have one for Japan and another for the US and their accounts and libraries are separate. I’ve held off creating a Canadian account for that reason, though if I buy it cheap from Canada (they have more sales, the bums! Haha), I could always strip the DRM and sideload it into my US Kobo.

I’m curious how you utilize this script.

[Aleron Ives]

You can "travel" on the Kobo store by changing your country and using PayPal so you don't have to enter a billing address.

[chrisridd]

Kobo's Japan store might be different, but so far I've successfully bought books from India, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Norway all by:

1. Removing my payment details from my account
2. Setting my "billing country" to the desired country
3. Going to the relevant store
4. Buying with PayPal, or credits on my account via a gift card

The Kobo apps are all able to download the purchased books.

Or in other words from experience Kobo's DRM just locks you to an account (an email address) and not a billing address/country/store.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

Kobo's Japan store might be different, but so far I've successfully bought books from India, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Norway all by:

1. Removing my payment details from my account
2. Setting my "billing country" to the desired country
3. Going to the relevant store
4. Buying with PayPal, or credits on my account via a gift card

The Kobo apps are all able to download the purchased books.

Or in other words from experience Kobo's DRM just locks you to an account (an email address) and not a billing address/country/store.

IMHO, it's best to get your eBooks as ePub which you can remove the DRM (if there is DRM), read as ePub, or convert to KePub to read.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

I wrote a little perl script to help me find which Kobo "country" store gives the cheapest prices for a book. It might be helpful to others.

GitHub gist

To use it, find the book you're interested in on the store, and pass the entire URL to the script. e.g.

kobocompare https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/alliance-rising-1

and wait a little bit.

I've hardcoded a set of currency conversions to GBP, which obviously could be improved by someone. Equally obviously it could check each store in parallel instead of one at a time. Patches welcome, as they say.

Could you please convert this to Python to run in calibre?

[chrisridd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Could you please convert this to Python to run in calibre?

I'm not a Python programmer so unfortunately not. It might be a nice project for someone, maybe you could request it in the Calibre forum section?

[chrisridd]

Sadly this script no longer works due to changes on kobo.com. The website now seems to return a page full of Javascript that you have to execute to get the "real" web page.

Maybe it is possible to rewrite it as a Javascript "bookmarklet" for your web browser? Help from Javascripting gurus is welcomed!

[sydmalicious]

I may be able to do this. It might be a little while as I am pretty busy, but looking at this Perl script it shouldn't be too hard- both Python and Perl are scripting languages and I work with Python a lot at my job.

[chrisridd]

I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with.

The pages I seem to download now are from Cloudflare and just contain lots of JavaScript which needs to be executed. Some of that seems to be to compute complex json requests to other URLs which then give some actual HTML.

Hence running it inside an actual browser, or maybe node.js (?) might be needed.

[sydmalicious]

Yeah. If you still want to use JavaScript, you could use something like Puppeteer which is a headless Chromium web scraper, much like Selenium and Beautiful Soup for Python. In fact using Puppeteer if you're wanting to keep it JavaScript would probably save you some time and headaches.

I wrote a broken script for Puppeteer which is in this GitHub gist, just to give you a feel for how it works: https://gist.github.com/twhite96/38b...05de2990dcbb9c

I am not sure how to share the automation with the community though. Maybe the creator of Calibre has some ideas? I think I have his name right but don't want to misspell it in this comment.

The docs are here: https://pptr.dev/

[sydmalicious]

Originally Posted by chrisridd

I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with.

The pages I seem to download now are from Cloudflare and just contain lots of JavaScript which needs to be executed. Some of that seems to be to compute complex json requests to other URLs which then give some actual HTML.

Hence running it inside an actual browser, or maybe node.js (?) might be needed.

Hmmmm. Let me see if I can't see what I can grab with a couple cURL commands or nmap. This sounds like they're behind a WAF which will make it difficult to actually grab that data without some finagling which would be a bad idea. I'll try to see what actually gets returned from the cURL command.

[sydmalicious]

I ran the cURL command cURL -I -L <kobo url> and the response is a 403 HTTP code which means it is forbidden. The headers indicate to me that, like I wrote in the previous reply, they are behind Cloudflare's WAF and the only way to get the data would be behind a proxy, if that. I don't think this can be done easily.

[fotonmoton]

Hi all!

TLDR: install userscript or Firefox/Chrome extension and go to book page. After a couple of minutes you will get a list of all available prices for different countries.

Let me introduce you the Kobo Price! A small userscript that automate price comparison for you. It will try to gather all available country prices, convert them to USD, sort and present them on book page. You just need to open book/audiobook page, wait a couple of minutes (waiting time is highly depends on your connection and PC performance) and get a list on the right side of the page.

You have a couple of options how you can install and use it right now:

1. Easiest way (not sure, honestly) is to download userscript and add it to
Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey/Greasemonkey.
1.1 Download one of the following extensions for your browser:
https://violentmonkey.github.io/
https://www.greasespot.net/
https://www.tampermonkey.net/
1.2 Go to koboprice.user.js and click "raw" on the right side
1.3 If extension don't recognize it as userscript and don't open window for importing it simpy copy and add it manually. You can find out how to do it in the extension docs.
1.4 That's it. You can now go to the book page and test it

2. Install the Kobo Price extension. Right now I go to the finish line only with Chrome extension so you can grab it here: Kobo Price Chrome
2.1 For the Firefox - I'm in the process of review and getting approval from the Firefox itself. So no public extension for now. But! I'm attaching self signed extension below that you can import manually. Just open it in the Firefox and it should show you prompt with confirmation.

3. Build extension from sources yourself and sideload it. Maybe I will add instructions in the future, if someone will have interest in tinkering with it or submitting changes. In two words: get it run

PHP Code:

npm install && npm build && npm ext-build 


and you will get an artifact in the web-ext-artifacts folder. Check Chrome/Firefox docs for how to load it. I want to add a little reactivity to it, so that you can see progress in real time. But, maybe, it will stay as is

Some notes:
- You can open developer tools in the browser, go to console and filter messages by "KOBOPRICE". You will see how and what prices are loading right now.

- Prices are cached as well as the currency rates in your browser localstorage. You can go to the page several times, safely reload it and script will continue from where it left. After all prices are loaded the will show immediately on the page. Prices are cached for one day so, be sure to check your favorite book every morning. If something not working as expected you can go to localstorage tab in your brawser developer tools and without hesitation delete "KOBOPRICE" key.

- I've managed to test it on Firefox for Android. So if you are really lazy as I am you can install Firefox extension or userscript on your phone. If you find out how to do it


Any suggestions are welcome, please test it and say what you think. Also, what to highlight that this "lifehack" will not survive for long. I think it was possible to do the same steps with Amazon, to get lowest price from different stores. But after sometime they make it nearly impossible to change your billing address to bypass their price inequality. But the war with the monopolies is not over! We will prevail!





kobo_price-1.1.9.xpi

[chrisridd]

Really nice work! I will be trying this out tomorrow.