Google Books Downloader

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on May 16, 2012

E-books are changing the way people read, and services like Google Books are leading the way with millions of free titles as well as a growing number of new titles published in electronic book formats, sometimes exclusively. Google Books Downloader is a simple piece of freeware that downloads e-books from Google Books and converts and saves them to a folder of your choice. It can save ebooks as PDF, JPEG, or PNG files that you can view in your browser or e-book reader. With it, Google Books can become your public library.

Google Books Downloader's installer offers two options, Standard and Custom. We chose the custom option, which let us skip an additional program we didn't want that otherwise will be installed with Google Books Downloader. The program's user interface is ultra-simple, just a field for entering a Google Book URL, another for specifying an Output folder, and a Start button. The Output Format menu has three choices -- PDF, JPEG, and PNG -- while the Resolution control let us specify text resolution in pixels ranging from 350px to 1,280px. There's no Help file or other controls beyond a link to the program's Web site.

It took mere moments to find a free title in Google Books. We copied and pasted the e-book's Web address into Google Books Downloader's entry field, selected PDF and 800px, and pressed Start. A progress bar tracked our download and conversion. After a few minutes, the job was done. We opened the output folder and clicked our downloaded e-book. It opened normally in out default PDF viewer, displaying perfectly clear text that stayed legible as we zoomed in and out. Google Books Downloader proved a great tool for quickly downloading e-books from Google Books and saving them to an easy-to-access location for loading them to your e-book reader.