Question

I’m trying to create a epub uploader to iBook in python. I need a python lib to extract book information. Before implementing this by myself I wonder if anyone know a already made python lib that does it.

Answer 1

An .epub file is a zip-encoded file containing a META-INF directory, which contains a file named container.xml, which points to another file usually named Content.opf, which indexes all the other files which make up the e-book (summary based on http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp ; full spec at http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf/opf2.0/download/ )

The following Python code will extract the basic meta-information from an .epub file and return it as a dict.

import zipfile
from lxml import etree

def epub_info(fname):
    def xpath(element, path):
        return element.xpath(
            path,
            namespaces={
                "n": "urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:container",
                "pkg": "http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf",
                "dc": "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/",
            },
        )[0]

    # prepare to read from the .epub file
    zip_content = zipfile.ZipFile(fname)
      
    # find the contents metafile
    cfname = xpath(
        etree.fromstring(zip_content.read("META-INF/container.xml")),
        "n:rootfiles/n:rootfile/@full-path",
    ) 
    
    # grab the metadata block from the contents metafile
    metadata = xpath(
        etree.fromstring(zip_content.read(cfname)), "/pkg:package/pkg:metadata"
    )
    
    # repackage the data
    return {
        s: xpath(metadata, f"dc:{s}/text()")
        for s in ("title", "language", "creator", "date", "identifier")
    }    

Sample output:

{
    'date': '2009-12-26T17:03:31',
    'identifier': '25f96ff0-7004-4bb0-b1f2-d511ca4b2756',
    'creator': 'John Grisham',
    'language': 'UND',
    'title': 'Ford County'
}