NCERT Books Downloader

Download free NCERT textbooks as merged PDFs, organised by class and subject. NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) publishes the official school textbooks used across India — this tool lets you download and save any of them offline as a single clean PDF, without navigating the NCERT website manually.

What it does

• Lets you pick a class and subject interactively, or specify them via flags
• Downloads the official chapter files from NCERT's servers
• Merges them into a single PDF per book, saved to a downloads/ folder
• Skips books already downloaded — safe to re-run at any time

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Quick start (recommended)

Install uv, then run:

uv run main.py

uv installs all dependencies automatically on first run. The script will guide you through picking a class, subject, and which books to download.

Don't have uv?

If you already have Python 3.10+ installed:

pip install pypdf questionary requests rich
python main.py

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Interactive usage

When you run the script without any flags, it walks you through three steps:

1. Pick a class — choose from Class 1 to 14, or download all classes at once
2. Pick a subject — filtered to what's available for that class
3. Pick books — download everything, or select specific titles with the spacebar

Books are saved to downloads/Class <N>/<Subject>/<Title>.pdf.

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Non-interactive usage

Pass flags to skip the prompts entirely — useful for scripting or automation:

uv run main.py --class 10                        # all Class 10 books
uv run main.py --class 10 --subject Mathematics  # specific class + subject
uv run main.py --list                            # browse the full catalog without downloading
uv run main.py --download-only                   # download zip files, skip PDF merging
uv run main.py --merge-only                      # merge already-downloaded zips into PDFs
uv run main.py --keep-zips                       # keep zip files after merging
uv run main.py --out ./books                     # save to a custom directory
uv run main.py --concurrency 5                   # limit parallel downloads

Re-running is always safe — files already downloaded or merged are skipped automatically.

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Updating the book catalog

The list of available books is stored in data.json. Regenerate it if the NCERT catalog changes:

uv run generate_data.py

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Development

uv sync --group dev   # install dependencies including dev tools
uv run main.py        # run the script

Running tests

uv run pytest tests/