
Show HN: A Web Extension to save a page or selection as eBook - eg312
https://github.com/alexadam/save-as-ebook
======
brunelli
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](http://alistapart.com/article/the-art-of-the-commit)

~~~
eg312
Thanks! ... You are right, I have a bad habit of not writing proper commit
messages when working on my projects (because, usually, nobody reads them
besides me :) ).

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erjjones
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.

~~~
jaytaylor
^ this, please!

I'll definitely be looking into this to replace Evernote for my current
clipping archival system.

Check it out at [http://jaytaylor.com/notes](http://jaytaylor.com/notes)

I've been very dissatisfied with the absolutely terrible bastardized HTML
served up by the Evernote API for web clippings, and this looks it could
become a _fantastic_ replacement!

~~~
eg312
Added on the to-do list. Thanks!

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antar
Amazon offers this extension for Chrome and Firefox.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-
for...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for-
google/cgdjpilhipecahhcilnafpblkieebhea?hl=en)

~~~
captn3m0
This is what I'm currently using for taking my long-reads to my Kindle. Except
it doesn't always work well. For eg, with the recent NYTimes article on the
Arab world[0], it didn't give me the entire content. As a hack, I found that
selecting all of the content and then using that as input worked, but I'm
still losing out on all the images and some formatting.

[0]:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/11/magazine/isis-...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/11/magazine/isis-
middle-east-arab-spring-fractured-lands.html)

~~~
ikeboy
Have you tried adding to pocket and then using something like
[https://p2k.co/](https://p2k.co/) or
[https://help.getpocket.com/article/911-how-to-configure-
cali...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/911-how-to-configure-calibre-with-
pocket) to sync to Kindle?

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derefr
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.

~~~
lfowles
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/](http://dosage.rocks/)

~~~
derefr
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](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.

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MistahKoala
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?

~~~
kej
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.

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

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justjonathan
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](https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html)

[Edit: formating and removed parenthetical within parenthetical]

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pseingatl
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.

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jflowers45
Nice. Also cool that Google Docs now lets you save as ePub

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/08/google-docs-now-lets-
you-e...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/08/google-docs-now-lets-you-export-
files-in-epub-ebook-format/)

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dbalbright
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).

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kayla210
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.

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j_k_s
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?

~~~
DKnoll
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.

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anotheryou
cool!

Luckily my kobo ebook reader has pocket integration though :)

