Your use-case is not what I built the library for (natural language processing, not text consumption), but let's see what we can do... You can download HTML E-

Your use-case is not what I built the library for (natural language processing, not text consumption), but let's see what we can do... You can download HTML E-Books using the following command: python -m gutenberg.download -vvv --filetypes=html --limit=5mb ./ebooks This will download 5mb of zipped E-Books for which there exists an HTML version to the ./ebooks directory. It seems as though the legal disclaimers and copyright notices in the HTML files are all within <pre> tags so we can easily clean-up the files with a small shell script: EBOOK_DIR="./ebooks" find "${EBOOK_DIR}" -name *.zip -type f -exec unzip -d "${EBOOK_DIR}" {} \; find "${EBOOK_DIR}" -name *.html -type f -exec sed -i '/<[pP][rR][eE]>/,/<\/[pP][rR][eE]>/d' {} \; This will probably not work for all E-Books, but it'll give you something to work with. Note that removing the copyright notices may or may not be against the Project Gutenberg terms of service. Downloading E-Books via genre, author, etc. is not currently supported but is something that I wanted to implement - so watch this space.