I spent almost 2 years writing a book for O'Reilly. I get a percentage of book sales, and royalties on views in the Learning platform. This project is, very literally, stealing from me.
Please, just buy the book. I -- and many other authors -- worked very hard on them.
> This project is, very literally, stealing from me.
That is, literally, not true. I have always had a safari subscription through my employers, but found the app to be unpleasant to use. Using this project to generate epub is not much different than me printing the pages through browser as pdf, or saving the HTML page to read offline.
It would be stealing if I distributed the generated epub, but then that's not really the author of the tool stealing from you.
Once O'Reilly stopped selling PDFs and shifted their focus into subscription, the needs of this kind of tools have grown. Their app and site is OK to skim through books, bad not good enough for serious reading. I hope they provide full-layout reading experience based on their PDF. Then majority of users of this tool would just come back.
I wonder how author payment works with the subscription. If users of these tools don't count for that, that's a bummer - People who opt to download epub would be deeply engaged readers and should be counted. If there is a way to signal the readership by adding a book to the shelf, for example, it should be done by these tools as well.
Please, just buy the book. I -- and many other authors -- worked very hard on them.