possible to create ebook programmatically? [closed]

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I am investigating whether it is possible to generate an ebook, say, a Kindle book, programmatically. are there any libraries, open source or proprietary? in particular, for python.

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An ebook or epub is just xhtml with some meta info and stuff. Every page is a xhtml file.

Here is a tutorial on How to Make an ePub eBook by Hand.

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Many but especially see calibre which can take text in various forms or HTML and convert to epub, mobi etc.

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For .epub, as others have said, any tool that can generate XHTML will work - partially. You may also need the ability to generate a .gz file, IIRC, since I think the outermost container for EPUB is of that format, but Python has support for that in the standard library. I think IBM developerWorks had a tutorial on how to generate EPUB format ebooks, maybe in Python. Search on their site for it. Liza Daly, founder of ThreePress, who specializes in publishing-related development (in Python) and is the creator of O'Reilly Bookworm, a web-based EPUB reading application, may also have some tools for generating EPUB on her site.

My own xtopdf toolkit (written in Python), which requires the open-source version of the Reportlab toolkit (also in Python) can be used to generate simple PDF ebooks from a set of text files, where each file represents a chapter of the book. In the xtopdf package (.zip / .gz file), there is a script called PDFBook.py which does this.

You can get xtopdf from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtopdf/

And this page has a guide to installing xtopdf and to using that PDFBook.py script:

http://www.mail-archive.com/python-list@python.org/msg100069.html

So if you can generate those chapter files as text, programmatically (which should be possible), you can combine that ability with the PDFBook.py program, to do what you need - programmatically generate ebooks - for the case of PDF ebooks.

If you need any help using xtopdf, feel free to contact me via my web site's contact page - dancingbison dot com slash contact dot html - use my Gmail address given there. The (hosted) site goes down for short periods sometimes, so if you can't access it, just try again sometime later.

HTH, Vasudev Ram

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Amazon provides kindlegen which is a command line program for generating an ebook from XML/HTML sources.

I generated books for Stack Overflow content using a set of scripts available here (the code is a mix of Python, Java, and XSLT).

Another example is rss2mobi which generates ebooks from a Google Reader feed (this one is all Python).

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creating an ebook in python is almost trivial if you want to do it in epub format.
if you want a link to something simple and working, have a look at txt2epub (and provide feedback if you please).

it is called txt 2 epub, but it also handles rst files.