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

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

#21

Post by kej »

MistahKoala wrote: post #12

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?

For non-browser content it would be hard to beat Calibre for ebook creation. If you can get the content out of email and into the file system you could even script the Calibre conversion.

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

#22

Post by derefr »

lfowles wrote: post #20
derefr wrote: post #19

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 i…

Have you seen Dosage? It supports a lot of webcomics, but I don't remember how general it was. (Edit: I missed that you finished by publishing the content as an epub) http://dosage.rocks/

Dosage seems to be more like a pseudo-RSS-client that relies on scraping cronjobs (for following live content that doesn't have an RSS feed; somewhat like what Dapper used to do) rather than a batch site-mirror-to-single-document transformer. I want this extension not for the new pages just coming out now, but rather to more comfortably go through the ten years of pages of something that have already built up (on my phone with a reflowed mobile layout†, and still available when offline.)

Side-note: webcomic authors have realized that there's a market for physical book-prints of their work, but they're ignoring the fact that people like me would gladly buy a digital version of the same book from the Kindle or iBooks store—even though we can read the individual pages online. People are willing to pay for convenience!

† And speaking of reflowed mobile layouts, I wish every webcomic reflowed the way Dinosaur Comics does (http://qwantz.com/index.php?mobile=1). It wouldn't work for those special "frame-boundary-breaking" art techniques, but most comics don't even use those.

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

#24

Post by DKnoll »

j_k_s wrote: post #23

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?

PDF is meant to be a digital equivalent to paper, thus it does not scale well to different screen sizes. An objective of PDF is for a document to look the exact same no matter where you open it.

ePub text and images can be reflowed to fit a smaller/larger screen, it is not proprietary, file sizes are smaller, and is overall an ideal format for ebooks.

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

#25

Post by rahimnathwani »

derefr wrote: post #19

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 i…

Calibre recipes can do this. You still need to specify the start page, xpath to get the chapters etc., but it works.

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

#26

Post by rakoo »

erjjones wrote: post #5

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.

Couldn't you save the resulting epub to a dropbox folder ?

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

#27

Post by unusximmortalis »

erjjones wrote: post #5

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.

Install dropbox sync app and point the extension to a subfolder of the dropbox sync root folder. Ta-da.
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