Downloading Raspberry Pi Press issues

In this post we will discover the great magazines edited under the Raspberry Pi Press umbrella and discuss how to easily access them all.

The Raspberry Pi Press magazines

The Raspberry Pi Press is a part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the publisher of a great deal of magazines and books. Among the many magazines edited, some are freely available for download,

• HackSpace is a monthly publication dedicated to those who love to make things and learn while doing it.
• HelloWorld is published three times a year and targets educators of the computing and digital world.
• MagPi is the official magazine of the Raspberry Pi and is loaded with stories and project based on the single board computer. Published every month, the latest issue is numbered N°95 as of the time of writing, making it an incredible source of inspiration.
• Wiredframe is published every 2 weeks and is entirely dedicated to video games. But unlike other video game magazines, it offers to look at how they are made, who make them and offer a lot of resources to get started writing your own games.

On top of that, The Raspberry Pi Press also publishes many great books.

Each magazine can be bought online and shipped around the globe. One can also sign for a yearly subscription, offering some discount and/or goodies. At the same time, issues are freely available to download in pdf from the magazine websites.

Bookshelf

Recently the Raspberry Pi Foundation presented the Raspberry Pi OS, a rebranding of Raspbian, highlighting some of its novelties. Among those novelties, they showcased a neat little app named Bookshelf that allows you to browse and download the issues of several magazines edited by the Raspberry Pi Press.

The application is a simple interface listing all issues of each magazine but also some of the books. It allows for simply downloading any issue by simply clicking on the desired cover.

Unfortunately this great app is only available through the Pi OS archive and its source code is not public at the time of writing. One can still download the deb package and install it manually. To do so, visit the app archive and look for the latest version of the debian package for your machine architecture. At the moment it is rp-bookshelf_0.4_amd64.deb for common computers. From there, we can simply download the debian and install it,

wget http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/r/rp-bookshelf/rp-bookshelf_0.4_amd64.deb
dpkg -i rp-bookshelf_0.4_amd64.deb

To launch the app simply type,

rp-bookshelf

Altho this procedure works fine, it is a little unpleasant. Furthermore, I personally don’t care much about the GUI and I’d rather prefer to automatically download the latest issues I care for. If you feel the same, keep on reading.

rpipress-downloader

The Raspberry Pi Press Store was recently entirely redesigned bringing some uniformization across all the magazine websites. That allows us to write a small web scrapping script to automatically download the latest (or all) issues and books of our favorite magazine(s).

So I went ahead and did just that, writing a small Python script that you can find on Github, or conveniently install as a Snap as follows,

sudo snap install rpipress-downloader

Its use it pretty simple, launch the script in a terminal and by default it will automatically search and download the latest issue of all aforementioned magazines.

Further options let you:

• specify which magazine to download

  rpipress-downloader --magazines magpi hackspace
  

• download all issues,

  rpipress-downloader --all
  

• download the books too,

  rpipress-downloader --books
  

• combine options so that,

  rpipress-downloader -a -m magpi -b
  

  will download all MagPi issues and books.

Issues and books are saved respectively in

• ~/rpipress/{magazine}
• ~/rpipress/{magazine}/Books

or, using the snap, in

• ~/snap/rpipress-downloader/current/rpipress/{magazine}
• ~/snap/rpipress-downloader/current/rpipress/{magazine}/Books.

Note that the script conveniently let you know the path by printing an hyperlink in the console,

$ rpipress-downloader -m magpi
Latest MagPi issue is N°95
You are up to date
Your favorite magazines are waiting for you in file:///home/artivis/snap/rpipress-downloader/5/rpipress

Please refer to the rpipress-downloader readme page for further information.

Have a good reading!