11-29-2023, 01:36 PM | #1 |
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Kobo store price comparisons
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. Code:
kobocompare https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/alliance-rising-1 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. |
12-01-2023, 07:20 PM | #2 |
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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. |
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12-01-2023, 10:49 PM | #3 |
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You can "travel" on the Kobo store by changing your country and using PayPal so you don't have to enter a billing address.
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12-02-2023, 05:00 AM | #4 |
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Kobo's Japan store might be different, but so far I've successfully bought books from India, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, Norway all by:
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. Last edited by chrisridd; 12-02-2023 at 05:01 AM. Reason: formatting |
12-02-2023, 05:05 AM | #5 | |
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12-02-2023, 05:06 AM | #6 | |
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12-02-2023, 10:39 AM | #7 |
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07-02-2024, 12:02 PM | #8 |
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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! |
07-12-2024, 05:08 PM | #9 |
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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.
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07-12-2024, 05:18 PM | #10 |
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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. |
07-12-2024, 05:24 PM | #11 |
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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/ Last edited by sydmalicious; 07-12-2024 at 05:25 PM. Reason: Context for links |
07-12-2024, 05:27 PM | #12 | |
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07-12-2024, 05:33 PM | #13 |
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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.
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