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EPUB tools

Some really simple scripts to help create EPUB files from online articles.

There are more complete tools out there. My main focus is:

  • Understandable, simple code
  • Human readable file formats that allow manual edits
  • Easily customizable - just clone the repo

Here is an example workflow to download a bunch of articles and convert them to an EPUB.

0. Installation

Simply clone this repo, run npm i to install dependencies and run the scripts via node.

1. Get content

To download an article and all required assets, you can use wget like this:

wget -p -k -H -nd -P chapter1 https://cool.site/some-article
  • It downloads the page into the given directory (-P | --directory-prefix)
  • Alongside the page, it downloads all styles/images/scripts (-p | --page-requisites)
  • All assets are downloaded into a single, flat directory (-nd | --no-directories)
  • Even if the assets are from different hosts (-H | --span-hosts)
  • Then all links to assets are rewritten to the local path (-k | --convert-links)

For websites which render using JavaScript, you'll need to use an actual Browser. Chrome can get you stated

2. Simplify to Markdown

The scripts use Markdown as its intermediate format. To simplify the downloaded index.html which we just got with "wget", run the script:

node simplify.js chapter1/index.html

This will create a new Markdown file at chapter1/index.md. You might want to do some manual cleanup afterward.

You can give multiple HTML files to the script, it will create the output files with the same name next to the source file. If your shell has glob support, you can do things like:

# Imagine we have "chapter1" and "chapter2" folders downloaded in the "book" folder
node simplify.js book/**/*.html

3. Bundle to EPUB

Once you're happy with the Markdown files, you can bundle them into an EPUB:

node bundle.js -a "Author" -t "Title" chapter1/index.md chapter2/index.md

Simply list all Markdown files to be bundled. The files are added in the order in which they are listed.

Optionally, you can specify author and title for the EPUB metadata and title page.

If your shell has glob support, you can do this:

# Again we have "chapter1" and "chapter2" folders downloaded in the "book" folder
node bundle.js -a "Me" -t "My Book" book/**/*.md

4. Validate

You can optionally validate the bundled EPUB file using EPUBCheck. This can help find issues in articles that can be manually resolved. It's a first step when EPUBs are not opened correctly by your chosen reader.

The scripts output has been tested with the following readers:

Reader Platform Issues
KOReader Desktop ✅ None
KOReader PocketBook ✅ None
iBooks MacOS ⚠️ Pages can appear empty. Change any rendering setting (like font size) and content should appear

Customization

  • To customize output, simply change the templates in the templates/ folder.
  • To customize workflow, change the specific script
  • To download a bunch of articles in one command, "wget" has a -i urls.txt flag which reads URLs from a file
  • All scripts accept file-paths as arguments - this works nicely with tools like fzf

Links and Resources