from Hacker News

Show HN: A Web Extension to save a page or selection as eBook

by eg312 on 8/18/16, 12:24 PM with 25 comments

  • by brunelli on 8/18/16, 1:15 PM

    Nice! I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

    I was just a bit disappointed when I went through the commit log, as it's not very descriptive. Here is a great article [1] on writing good commit messages.

    [1]: http://alistapart.com/article/the-art-of-the-commit

  • by erjjones on 8/18/16, 3:04 PM

    Next. Someone in the community wire this up to an API (dropbox, or something) so that when I save as ePub it also puts a copy in my dropbox so that I can read it on the road.

  • by antar on 8/18/16, 3:58 PM

    Amazon offers this extension for Chrome and Firefox.

    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...

  • by derefr on 8/18/16, 7:25 PM

    I read a lot of "serial archive"-formatted things (webcomics, online novels, etc.) I've always wanted an extension like this that will spider rel="next" and rel="previous" links/headers (or, not finding those, try to guess a pair of links on the page that represent those) to build up an archive sequence; chew that into a set of pages+sections; generate a Table of Contents for those; and then stick all that together into an ePub.

    I've written scrapers to do exactly that for a few works, but they're one-offs that get their metadata (e.g. chapter titles) from explicit provided data-structures rather than from the site itself. A fully-general solution to this would be amazing.

  • by MistahKoala on 8/18/16, 5:30 PM

    Ooooh, now this is interesting!

    Presumably it clips just the article and not all the textual content on a page?

    I've long had an idea for an ePub app that will take email newsletters and compile them into something like a weekly ePub. I'm not a dev, though. I don't suppose there's any scope for this plugin to eventually work with non-browser content, is there?

  • by ikeboy on 8/18/16, 3:08 PM

    https://dotepub.com/ does the same with a bookmarklet, although I don't think it's open source.

  • by justjonathan on 8/18/16, 5:44 PM

    This looks nice for a one off.

    If you are interested in automating this on a regular basis (perhaps to read the morning's news / blogs) I recommend Calibre, it is an amazing free (speech & beer) ebook management system that has this baked in.

    Here is the relevant manual section: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html

    [Edit: formating and removed parenthetical within parenthetical]

  • by pseingatl on 8/18/16, 4:03 PM

    Epub has the potential of surpassing doc files as a document exchange format. It's so much easier to read an ePub than a pdf or a doc file on a phone.

  • by jflowers45 on 8/18/16, 3:00 PM

    Nice. Also cool that Google Docs now lets you save as ePub

    http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/08/google-docs-now-lets-you-e...

  • by dbalbright on 8/18/16, 5:54 PM

    Anything that can work as well as Clearly. It's the best I've found at clipping articles for off-line archiving but it still makes me nervous having them on Evernote's platform when they said they were going to shut Clearly down (but apparently had a change of heart, for now).

  • by kayla210 on 8/18/16, 5:58 PM

    Really nice! This is a lot more convenient than opening a Print dialog and choosing to save as PDF, which doesn't always work like you want it to. I haven't used ePub format yet, but it seems to be a format gaining traction in the eBook world.

  • by j_k_s on 8/18/16, 10:29 PM

    As someone who hasn't really used epub files, what's the benefit of it over PDF? I assume file sizes are smaller, but ... what else?

  • by anotheryou on 8/18/16, 7:08 PM

    cool!

    Luckily my kobo ebook reader has pocket integration though :)