E-Book Project

I have been downloading Kindle books for some time now. Normally I pull them down to my Kindle reading program on my PC. Most of the books were free when I got them. However I bought a few of them that I really wanted. Now I want to do something to organize these books. I do have a folder system in my Kindle program. But I want something better.

I figured I could maybe set up a database to store all the details. This would require me to scrape the Amazon web site for info. How do I grab all the book titles and find their pages. Well first I started with the books I downloaded. Since I run Windows 7, then seem to be stored in location C:\Users\\Documents\My Kindle Content.

The books are stored in an AZW format. Some say that is Amazon Word format, which is the MOBI format with high compression. They might have DRM on them. Or they might not. The DRM, if present, locks the book to the device ID. I imagine the locking only works on real Kindle products, not my Kindle reading program.

I did realize that every time I download a book, I have Amazon send me an email which I catalog. Bingo. Those emails have the book name and link to the book on Amazon. Now I got to dump all those emails out, read them into my database, and code up a Amazon site crawler. This is going to be a very fun project. Feels like my roots ... writing programs to grab stuff off the web.