CREATE A BOOKSHELF ID AND REDEEM AN E-TEXTBOOK CODE QUICK START GUIDE If you are not a registered user, you can easily become one by creating a new Bookshelf® ID. Type in a primary email address and a password you would like to use for your new account. The email address you enter is the Bookshelf ID you will use to login to your account. VitalSource Bookshelf Android app: Accessibility tips; VitalSource Bookshelf App for Android: Quick Start Guide; VitalSource Bookshelf App for iOS: Quick Start Guide; VitalSource Bookshelf for PC and Mac: An overview; वाइटल सोर्स से ई-पब कैसे पढ़ें (How to read e-pub books with VitalSource.
Every now and then, students and researchers purchase textbooks from Vitalsource Bookshelf. Most of the books downloaded from VitalSource Bookshelf are in VBK format and protected by DRM. People only can open these books with VitalSource Bookshelf APP which is really annoying. Recently I have received many readers emails which inquiry if there is any way to convert VBK to PDF. I've tested some methods posted on these famous ebook related forums and find the easiest way to convert VBK to PDF. This method will cost you no penny!
Update: Since there are many readers want to convert the VBK to pdf in whole, we launch a new software--Epubor VitalSource Downloader to download the VitalSource eTextbooks to PDF/EPUB.
General method :
Easiest method:
Convert VBK to PDF on Mac
If you are Mac user, converting VBK to PDF is a piece of cake for you. Most of you may do not know that Mac comes pre-installed with a PDF printer. With this built-in printer, it is easy for us convert VitalSource book to PDF.
Step 1: Install VitalSource Bookshelf APP on your Mac
To Print the book, first of all, we have to open this book on your Mac. Please go to the official site of VitalSource Bookshelf to download the desktop app and install it. Then download the books you want to print via VitalSource Bookshelf app.
Step 2: Print VitalSource VBK file to PDF
Open the book you want to print, then choose 'Print' at the dropdown list of 'File“ option at the top toolbar.
It will pop up a new window asking you to fill in the range of the pages you want to print. In this window, you will see that if there is print limitations. If yes, we can not bypass the limitations for now. Ignore this restriction and just click on 'continue' to go to the next step.
The print window will pop up. Now you can fill in the copies, pages you want to print. At the buttom, you will see PDF options, click on 'PDF' and select ”Save as PDF' at the dropdown list.
Fill in the 'Title', 'Author', and choose the storages place for the converted PDF file. Then click on ' Save' to generate the PDF file.
Now you get your VBK file converted to PDF. Since there may be print limitations, you may have to follow the above guide to print the rest pages. When all pages has been printed to PDF, you can merge them to one PDF file with Epubor PDF & Merger & Splitter. Now you can get a full book.
Convert VBK to PDF on Windows
Unlike Mac, if you are using Windows system, there will not be a built-in printer preinstalled on your computer. As there are so many free PDF creation appliation on the market, why not install one on your Windows? I have used both doPDF and CutePDF. Both of them work well as a Virtual PDF printer on my own Windows.
Step 1: Install VitalSource Bookshelf app on your Windows
Go to VitalSource Bookshelf to download the desktop app and then install it on your Windows.
Step 2: Install doPDF on your computer
Download the FREE virtual printer driver doPDF here. This virtual printer will allow you print files as regular printer, but the result will be a PDF, not a real paper.
Step 3: Print the VitalSource Books as PDF
Open the VitalSource Bookshelf and download the book you want to convert. Open the book and then click on 'File'-->”“Print'.
The print preview window will pop up. You just have to click on 'print' to go to the next step.
Now you will see the print settings window. Choose 'doPDF 9' as the virtual printer and select all pages. Then click on 'Print'.
After you have clicked on 'Print', the doPDF will save this file as PDF. You can change the file name and storage at your computer by clicking on 'Browse'. Then click on 'OK'. The printer will begin to print this file and give you a PDF file.
As there may be print limitation, you have to print the pages one by one. After all pages have been printed, you can use Epubor PDF & Merger & Splitter to merge all pdf files to one book.
Convert VBK to PDF with Epubor VitalSource Downloader
The above mentioned methods are very complex and time-consuming, and you need to install so many software to achieve your goal. It will take about your whole days to download a book with one thousand pages. That's why I want to introduce Epubor new software --Epubor VitalSource Downloader to you. With this software, you can download the VitalSource books to pdf with one click.
Step 1: Install the Epubor VitalSource Downloader
Download Epubor VitalSource Downloader for free:
Updated 2/18/2019: Epubor Vitalsource Downloader is not available for downloading any more for force majeure.
Download the Epubor VitalSource Downloader and install it on your computer. It supports both Windows and Mac system.
Step 2: Log in your VitalSource Bookshelf
Then run VitalSource Downloader and you will see a window as below.
You just need to fill in your VitalSource account information to sign in your VitalSource Bookshelf. See? Very clean interface, right?
Tips:
1. It won't remember your account info unless you allow to do that. And the account logging in settings is set to be used for the library accessing so that all your vitalsource eTextbooks can be downloaded well.
2, It may take a little while to successfully log in your account if your network is not so fluent, please be patient.
3, Updated 12/19/2018: It now supports batch downloading. Right right click the mouse to select 'Download all books' or 'Download selected books'.
When you log in, you will see all books you purchased from VitalSource website. If you found that not all purchased books are displayed in this library, close the software and restart it again please.
Step 3: Download VitalSource Bookself to PDF
To get the PDF file, you just need to DOUBLE-CLICK on the book cover to download your books. You can also click on the 'cloud' like icon, it will allow you to download the book too.
When the downloading is started, the processing bar will show you the process. Please wait patiently until the downloading completed. Keep in mind that, to ensure the downloading speed, you are allowed to download one book only at a time!
When the downloading is finished, it will pop up the output location which stores the downloaded PDF or EPUB books. You can also click on the blue folder icon, it will show you the output path.
Instead of vbk file, you will get the PDF or EPUB file downloaded to your computer according to the book original formats. If the book you purchased is Page-Fidelity Textbook (PDF), the book you downloaded will be in PDF. If the book you purchased is Reflowable Textbook (EPUB), the book you downloaded will be in epub. In this situation, you need to convert the epub to PDF with Epubor eBook converter.
You can watch the video tutorial to know how to convert the VitalSource vbk to PDF.
Now you can try to convert your VitalSource ebooks to PDF with Epubor VitalSource Downloader. If you think this article is useful, please spread it to more places or give us a thumb up. If you had any better suggestions, you are welcome to share these methods in the comments.
Updated 2/18/2019: Epubor Vitalsource Downloader is not available for downloading any more for force majeure.
Iris Yan joined Epubor since 2017. She always wants to share everything related to ebook reading and improve your reading journey.
Code to legally and automatically print your purchased e-books from VitalSource.com
This program automates the printing of PDF's from the VitalSource Bookshelf. The VitalSource Bookshelf usually only lets the user print 2 pages at a time, and manually doing this for the entire book is tedious and time consuming. This program automatically prints any selection or the entirety of an e-book, page by page, and rapidly concatenates everything into a single PDF file. As this program makes use of keyboard automation, this process assumes that the user is away from the computer for the duration of the process, though the user at any time can stop the script from continuing.
New scripts have been introduced for situations where the pages appear like '4-1' and situations where the user is required to press Ctrl + Pagedown to go to the next chapter.
Legal disclaimer:Usage of any content produced by this script must abide the terms set out by VitalSource at https://support.vitalsource.com/hc/en-us/articles/204612518. In a nutshell this means no commercial usage or distribution, and only personal use is allowed. If you do decide to mass distribute, do so at your own risk since your name and email will appear on the top page of each print out.
Getting Started
Here's a link to the video tutorial (made for the original script): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TUxpMezwUA
To get started you are going to need a working version of Python 3 because as of this time the only working script is written in Python 3. Visit https://www.python.org/downloads/ to find the desired version for your operating system.
If you're just installing Python 3 for the first time or reinstalling it, I highly recommend using Python 3.4.0 or higher as this version comes built with a feature called pip that easily allows you to install approved third party packages not included with Python by default. To find more information about pip, visit: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip.
Note: If you're on Linux or Ubuntu, pip doesn't come with 3.4.0 or higher. The part of this section involving pip is referenced from https://automatetheboringstuff.com, a book that is a large inspiration for this program and one that I would highly recommend to anyone learning python. To learn how to get pip on Ubuntu or Linux, visit https://automatetheboringstuff.com/appendixa/
You're also going to need the VitalSource Bookshelf software, which you can find at: https://support.vitalsource.com/hc/en-us/articles/201344733-Bookshelf-Download-Page
The next things you need are the following third party packages:
PyPDF2
pyautogui
You of course must have Python 3 to install these packages. The easiest way to securely download and install these packages involves calling pip from your command prompt / terminal. If you don't have pip installed, you will have to manually download and insert these packages:https://docs.python.org/3/install/
This guide will proceed using pip. Navigate to your terminal and type the following commands one line at a time:
Windows users
OS X and Linux users:
The first command is run as a precatuionary step to catch an error with Pillow not installing correctly and a missing dependency. If Pillow still doesn't install correctly, try easy_install Pillow if you're on Windows and sudo easy_install Pillow if you're on Mac or Linux.
Now you're ready to get started. In the case that you find the remainder of this tutorial visually hard to follow, be sure to check out the tutorial video.
Walkthrough
This section will go through each part of the process step-by-step.
Pre-requisites
Even with the necessary packages and software components, a few things need to be set before the script can function correctly.
First open up VitalSource Book Shelf. Double click on the ebook you want to print to get it to pop-out. Now that you have it in place, make a new destination folder for your printed ebook to be located. A simple example could be a folder on your desktop called 'Ebook'. Make sure this folder doesn't contain a pdf named 'Ebook.pdf,' as that is used as a temp file name by the script.
The next part is very important. The script will not work unless these three pre-conditions are met:
You need to have a PDF printer that doesn't automatically open the newly printed PDF
You need to print a 'sample pdf' at the location of your destination ebook folder
You need sufficient disk space to save, as the output PDF tends to be large in size (possibly up to a GB or more)
Firstly, you need to have a PDF printer that doesn't automatically open the newly printed PDF. For example, Adobe does this. You will need to disable this functionality if want the script to work. In the future, the script can be improved to account for this situation. One working PDF printer that comes with Windows is 'Microsoft Print to PDF' and I reccommend using that if you are on Windows. I'm currently not too familiar with PDF printers for OS X and other systems and it would be appreciated if anyone can give an example of the analog for 'Microsoft Print to PDF.' Otherwise, any PDF printer that doesn't open new PDF's automatically, or one that can turn off this feature, will work.
The second condition is that a 'sample pdf' needs to be printed at the location of your ebook folder. This needs to be done to ensure that all intermediary PDF files being printed from VitalSource Bookshelf are in that ebook folder by default, as the script relies on this location. Ctrl + P and print a sample 2 page PDF to your ebook folder and that will set VitalSource to do its default printing there.
The last condition is that you must have enough disk space to save your ebook. A 1270 page ebook took up 673 MB, which translates to about 1.89 MB per page. Bare in mind that ebooks widely differ in their content and hence there is a lot of variance in the possibilities of disk space usage so the final memory of the finished ebook could be widely different. To reduce the memory size of the finished ebook, various free PDF compressers exist such as https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf, which has no file size limits and can reduce the size by up to 75% (the 1270 page ebook turned from 673 MB into 179 MB!). For safety, I reccommend having at least 1 GB of disk space available.
Executing the script
If you don't know what you are doing, open VitalSourcePrinter.py in an environment of your choice. Python usually comes with a default environment called IDLE that can be used if you don't have a custom environment that supports Python. This can be easily performed by right clicking the .py file and clicking 'edit with IDLE.'
For viewing and operational purposes, it's a good idea to have the code view and the VitalSource ebook window close to each other. Once the script runs, it will automate keyboard actions so you need to be able to call focus to the VitalSource ebook window by clicking on it before the keyboard automations start. This will be touched upon soon.
Now run the script. Follow the prompt and input the desired page ranges for roman numerals and regular numbers. If no roman numerals are desired, input 'None' or 'none'. Only valid numbers and roman numerals work. If you're using another script aside from the original script, you will be prompted for other fields such as chapter count and chapter last page.
Side note: Typing names like 'inside front cover' won't be recieved by the script, and hence if you would like pages with specific names to be included, you would need to manually print those out and separately concatenate them to the finished Ebook pdf. This could be another feature to be added in the future.
After the page ranges are entered, the program will prompt you to pick a folder. You must pick the ebook folder you printed your sample PDF in. After picking the folder, a countdown of 8 seconds will begin before the printing automation starts. Click on the active VitalSource window and the script will run.
Note: To stop the script at any time, mouse over to the console window where the script is running and close it. It will say 'the program is still running, do you want to kill it?' Choose 'yes'.
Once the script runs to completion, you will see the message 'done!' and the elapsed time in hours.
Remarks
A 1270 page ebook takes around 3.5 hours to print. That's about 6 pages a minute. Not too bad, though not perfect. The lengthy time is due to the design of the code, which was informed by trial and error. There were situations where names and keyboard operations would skip or not perform correctly due to happening too fast for VitalSource BookShelf to process. Moreover, intermediary files generated by VitalSource BookShelf were not recognized by the system if there was no waiting time after their generation, so waiting time was introduced to catch this error. At the end of the day (pun intended), you can use this script to print any ebook you want while sleeping, or when you are away from your computer of course.
I hope this program is helpful and if any problems or issues arise, I encourage you to reach out to me and I will do my best to fix them. Any ideas, suggestions, or improvements would also be welcome.