Startup Idea: Startup Idea for Comprehensive Web Pages to eBook Converter
I often have trouble gathering large websites (thousands of individual pages at a time) and creating a single eBook out of them efficiently. My current workflow for this involves opening thousands of tabs in my web browser and then pasting the content of each individual page into a word processor or a text editor (depending on the particular sort of site involved). The word processor document or text document is then fed into Calibre for making an actual eBook file (for our group, we create both EPUB and AZW3 format books, to cover the major ereaders).
This is awkward to say the least, as any browser I've tried experiences frequent crashes and slow down with that many tabs open at once. However, just opening one page at a time takes a very long time to gather all the content, and depending on the particular site you may need every page to have been opened as close together as possible to ensure consistency.
I, and the others who participate in this project, would be willing to pay a reasonable utility software price between $10 and $25 for something that would be able to gather up all the links, needed images or videos, etc. And then place them into a format suitable for import to Calibre to be converted to EPUB, such as DOCX format or HTMLZ. For most sites involved with this, the urls of pages lend themselves handily to the preferred order of pages, for others the layout on an initial page is enough to keep things in order.
For clarity, we are a loose group of fans of user-generated content sites, largely hosting short fiction, who seek to have the sites made into files that are usable on e-ink readers, since it's easier to read that way. It's also handy for accessibility purposes for some people, as the streamlined format is often useful for screen readers, and it's also handy for people with bad/intermittent internet accessibility who can't otherwise use the original sites well. I have tried many times, but the best you tend the get are tools like WinHTTrack which simply download the pages you want without placing them into a single file. I've used many search terms like "merge website into book" but nothing really does it.
Currently we just have to copy the material off each page manually into large documents, which takes quite a while on large sites.
Submitter: Andrew. (view contact info)