Update (20 Feb 2014): It looks like the Maxwell Institute changed their website and the script no longer works. It's fixable, but I don't know when I'll get around to it.
I posted about this elsewhere a little while ago, so apologies if this is old news for some of you. I recently discovered that the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, has made the text of many or all of the books they publish available online. This includes the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.
I've been wanting the read Nibley's books for some time. Now that they were available electronically (and for free), I wanted to be able to read these texts within FBReader, the ebook reader that I have on my Nokia N800. I put the first one into a epub-formatted ebook by hand, but then, seeing as there are many more of these books that I am interested in reading, I decided to write a Python script, GetBook.py, to generate ebooks directly from the website. Given the book ID encoded in the book's URL, it grabs the book title, author, chapters, and text, and formats it into a epub ebook. It works quite well, although I am aware of at least one small bug that I haven't fixed yet. The script and instructions for using it are posted on my website. Let me know if you need any help with it or have any suggestions for making it better.
NB: I've had a number of requests for me to send the epubs to people. I don't know whether or not it's legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I'm not sending them to people at this point.
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5 comments:
Hey. i love the idea of being able to turn these into epubs through a script. I have an ipad and would like to have these electronically in iBooks. Do you have these in epub format you could simply email to me? I do not have experience in python. Thanks. email is jimniels at gmail dot com
Hey same question. I'm on a mac and have tried and tried with the python/utidylib thing and it just won't work. Could you email me the epubs? Keep up the good work!!
jeugenekim@yahoo.com
I thank you for the instructions for making Hugh Nibley's great works into epub format. However the getbook script always makes an unreadable Abraham in Egypt: book id 48, and an unreadable Teachings of the Book of Mormon Part 4: book id 119.
Any suggestions? I bought my father and iPad and he really wants to read Hugh Nibley's works. Thanks for all of your help.
Jacob
Jacob -
Those books are working fine for me. I know a past version of the script had problems with one of them, though. Try downloading the script again, just to make sure you have the most recent version. If you still have problems, you can contact me through my web page, http://guavaduck.com.
Thanks so much for sharing that link! I'm so excited for the chance to read through these books.
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