Raw Thought: The Weblog of Aaron Swartz in Markdown, PDF, and ePub | Hacker News Reader

Raw Thought: The Weblog of Aaron Swartz in Markdown, PDF, and ePub

github.com

76 pointsjoshleitzel15 comments

I believe SBP (aaronsw's digital executor) is planning to make sure his domain is maintained and all the content remains available. But I do think it's nice to have this stuff in non-HTML form--ePub especially is great.

Be sure to ping rememberaaronsw@gmail.com (Aaron's friends and family) and let them know.

Also, did you look into using html2text (https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text) to generate the Markdown? Might be a fitting tribute to try it. It would be helpful to include the generating scripts in the repo no matter what.

Thanks, I'll be sure to let them know!

I haven't looked into using it, but I will! Want to improve the generation process if I can. I went ahead and pushed all the scripts I used, but they're a tad messy right now (was tweaking them); hope to clean them up soon.

I know you've already spent the time to build the PDF and epub converters, but if you want to use Leanpub to get the PDF, epub and mobi versions, you're totally welcome to.

Since you already have Markdown, it would be ridiculously easy to do.

We don't take (or want!) copyright on anything generated on Leanpub, so you're free to do what you want with it after it has been generated for you.

I'm not suggesting is that you sell it on Leanpub -- we only want to sell things that are put on Leanpub by their creators -- just that you use us as a generator and distribute the files as you wish they're created.

I actually didn't "build" the converters, I used the excellent Pandoc tool to do it for me. (Even used them to do the HTML-Markdown conversion.)

(I never thought about this before but I would love to be able to convert arbitrary blogs to ebook formats.)

Me too! It was something I was actually thinking about before doing this project, so I hope to be able to port this to a more general solution in the near future.

Nice work – Including the generating scripts in the repo would be great.

Thanks! I've went ahead and uploaded the generating scripts (all the *.rbs at the root level). They're a bit messy b/c I was tweaking them to deal with various idiosyncrasies, but I'll hopefully get time to clean them up this week.

It seems that Amazon's Kindle ebook reader doesn't support the epub format. It would probably be a good idea to include another ebook format as well, like mobipocket.

For what it's worth, Calibre will convert it for you ( and manage your library. ) it's a bit of effort to use but its something you rarely have to use. http://calibre-ebook.com

This is easily accomplished by kindlegen[1], which takes in an epub file and spits out a mobi file.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...

Thanks for pointing me to that! I used it to convert the ePub to Mobi and added it to the repo.

I added a Mobi version!

Seems there is no table of contents for the 1000 page ebook.

You're right! I'll try to add that today. Thanks.

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