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Kindle The Economist

Backstory

I really enjoy reading The Economist as a less hysteric alternative to German media. Unfortunately, for some reason every other print issue gets lost in the mail leaving me only with the online version of the print edition on economist.com which is incompatible with my breakfast table. Since the Kindle version of the Economist has to be subscribed on top of the print edition and I don't see why I should pay twice, I wrote this little scraper script.

Requirements

This is necessary to run the script:

  • A valid The Economist subscription (linked with your economist.com account)
  • Ruby 1.9.1+
  • ImageMagick

If you want your files to be converted to Kindle-compatible mobi files:

  • kindlegen

For direct delivery to your kindle:

  • SMTP server credentials

Install

  1. Download the files from the git repository and put them anywhere on your hd.

  2. Install the bundler Ruby gem:

    gem install bundler

  3. To onstall all dependencies, open a prompt in the kindle-the-economist directory and execute:

    bundle install

  4. If you don't have ImageMagick yet, download and install (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php). Make sure the ImageMagick binaries (esp. identify and mogrify) are in the path.

  5. You can download kindlegen free of charge (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621). Put the binary (kindlegen or kindlegen.exe) in the ./bin directory of kindle-the-economist.

  6. Rename config.yml.template to config.yml and change all config values appropriately. The only section strictly required is the "credentials" with your economist.com login information. All other sections are optional.

Run

Windows: Execute bin/kte.bat

Linux: Execute bin/kte.sh

If you run the script without any arguments, the current issue is downloaded. On both platforms you may pass one or more specific issues (by date) for download like so:

kte.[bat/sh] 2011-11-05 2011-11-12 ...

That's it.