Get alerted when your Kobo wishlist books drop in price

The brilliant kobodl Python package allows you to interact with your Kobo account programmatically. You can list all the books you've purchased, download them, and - as of version 0.12.0 - view your wishlist.

Here's a rough and ready Python script which will tell you when any the books on your wishlist have dropped below a certain amount.

Prerequisites

1. Install kobodl following their guide.
2. Log in with your account by running kobodl user add
3. Check that the configuration file is saved in the default location /home/YOURUSERNAME/.config/kobodl.json

Get your wishlist

The kobodl function GetWishList() takes a list of users and returns a generator. The generator contains the book's name and author. The price is a string (for example 5.99 GBP) so needs to be split at the space.

Here's a quick proof of concept:

 Python 3import kobodl
wishlist = kobodl.book.actions.GetWishList( kobodl.globals.Settings().UserList.users )
for book in wishlist:
    print( book.Title + " - "  + book.Author + " " + book.Price.split()[0] )

Sort the wishlist

Using Pandas, the data can be added to a dataframe and then sorted by price:

 Python 3import kobodl
import pandas as pd

#   Set up the lists
items  = []
prices = []
ids    = []

wishlist = kobodl.book.actions.GetWishList( kobodl.globals.Settings().UserList.users )

for book in wishlist:
    items.append( book.Title + " - "  + book.Author )
    prices.append( float( book.Price.split()[0] ) )
    ids.append( book.RevisionId )

#   Place into a DataFrame
all_items = zip( ids, items, prices )
book_prices = pd.DataFrame( list(all_items), columns = ["ID", "Name", "Price"])
book_prices = book_prices.reset_index()  

#   Get books cheaper than three quid
cheap_df = book_prices[ book_prices["Price"] < 3 ]

Create the Message

This will write the body text of the email. It gives you the price, book details, and a search link to buy the book.

 Python 3from urllib.parse import quote_plus

#   Search Prefix
website = "https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/search?query="

#   Email Body
message = ""

for index, row in cheap_df.sort_values("Price").iterrows():
    name  = row["Name"]
    price = str(row["Price"])
    link = website + quote_plus( name )
    message += "£" + price + " - " + name + "\n" + link + "\n\n"

Send an Email

Python makes it fairly easy to send an email - assuming you have a co-operative mailhost.

 Python 3import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage

#   Send Email
def send_email(message):
    email_user = 'you@example.com'
    email_password = 'P@55w0rd'
    to = 'destination@example.com'
    msg = EmailMessage()
    msg.set_content(message)
    msg['Subject'] = "Kobo price drops"
    msg['From'] = email_user
    msg['To'] = to
    server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('example.com', 465)
    server.ehlo()
    server.login(email_user, email_password)
    server.send_message(msg)
    server.quit()

send_email( message )

Setting the settings

When running as a script, it is necessary to ensure the settings are correctly initialised.

 Python 3from kobodl.settings import Settings

my_settings = Settings()
kobodl.Globals.Settings = my_settings

The End Result

I have a cron job which runs this every morning. It sends an email like this:

Next Steps

Some possible ideas. If you can code these, let me know!

• Save the prices so it sees if there's been a drop since yesterday.
• Compare prices to Amazon for eBook Arbitrage.
• Automatically buy any book that hits 99p.

Happy reading!