Entrepreneur Manual: Paul Graham's Essays in ePub Format

https://github.com/davidyang/Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub

by dy • 15 years ago

57 19 15 years ago

dy6• 15 years ago

I was reading the Startup Bible in PDF that I had on my iPhone and decided that such great writing deserved better presentation.

There are some formatting gotcha's, I put this together rather quickly so it uses some libraries that aren't too gentle with pg's circa 2001 HTML formatting.

I hope this doesn't violate pg's sense of copyright of his works, if so, will take down immediately.

seiji• 15 years ago

Warning: don't click on the epub file expecting to see anything useful. Your browser will gobble all your available memory to show you a binary zip file.

dy6• 15 years ago

Yes, you should Save Link As or something similar.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

I rejected your warning because I am a naturally inquisitive person, so I wanted to see exactly what would happen.

I shouldn't have.

icco2• 15 years ago

Did you file a bug on github? Because it sounds like one.

odiroot• 15 years ago

Yeah, thanks, already too late :/

jpr• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, what OS and browser? Opera on Ubuntu just displayed a big ass box of non-readable text but didn't gobble all my memory or anything.

dreeves• 15 years ago

Seems to be missing one of my favorites: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

I've been thinking about making a tool based on that idea: http://makerscheduler.com aka http://msched.com

dy6• 15 years ago

icco Added a mobi version (Thanks!) and I put in an updated version that had a few bugs. There are definitely spacing issues etc but you can pretty easily understand the original meaning. Here's the main loop of code that extracts the text, if anyone has a better idea let me know:

  source = open(link['href']).read
  
  text = Readability::Document.new(source, :tags => %w[div p br font]).content
  xhtml_text = Sanitize.clean(text, :elements => ['a', 'div', 'pre', 'br', 'font', 'p', 'img', 'table', 'tr', 'td'], :attributes => {:all => ['class', 'id', 'src', 'href']})
  xhtml_text = Mustache.render(xhtml_template, :title => link.text, :content => xhtml_text)

where ePub formats expect something like

  xhtml_template = <<XHTML
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml>
    <head>
    <title>{{title}}</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <h2>{{title}}</h2>
  {{{content}}}
    </body>
  </html>
  XHTML

dpapathanasiou• 15 years ago

Instead of using this xhtml_template, you should pass the content through tidy with the -asxhtml switch on.

This will produce a valid xhtml file that passes epub validation (http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/).

dy6• 15 years ago

Awesome - exactly the information I was looking for, will set it up later tonight and post both a new ePub and the source.

taylorbuley• 15 years ago

Was hoping to see "republished with permission" somewhere before downloading. Does PG give open license to reproduce/distribute?

sfk• 15 years ago

Well, he funds scribd, which has a substantial amount of illegal content. I don't think he should complain.

wazoox2• 15 years ago

Hum, you could as well have said:"he's an internet entrepreneur, and internet is choke full of illegal content, so he shouldn't complain".

icco2• 15 years ago

Just because he funds a website that doesn't tightly monitor what is submitted does not mean it is ok to freely distribute his work without permission. That being said, the articles are already available for free on his website, but I do not see a license on them.

wazoox2• 15 years ago

Something isn't right. It doesn't work in Epub reader (FF extension), it doesn't open in Calibre, and it doesn't open on my PRS-505.

Entrepreneur Manual: Paul Graham's Essays in ePub Format

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