create Periodical from HTML with ebook-convert.

[schnidrig]

Hi

I'd like to convert a regular web-site (not RSS enabled) into a Sony PRS-650 compatible periodical (just like recipes do) with ebook-convert <from>.html <to>.epub

this creates a working epub with a TOC. However, the Sony reader will not accept it as a periodical.

Is there a way to achieve this? Am I missing some cli option?

Thanks
christian

[Mike L]

Christian, I'm not sure if this is what you want, but I think Instapaper (www.instapaper.com) can do this, without any additional software.

The steps are as follows:

1. Save the web pages in Instapaper (the easiest way to do that is to install the Instapaper bookmarklet).

2. Go to Instapaper, log in, and copy the pages that you just saved to a folder (which you previously created; you only have to do that once).

3. Click the ePub icon. This will download the articles as a single ePub publication, complete with ToC.

4. Copy the downloaded file to your device.

I have never actually done this, so I can't be sure that the above will work. But I do a very similar procedure every week to get a bunch of magazine articles to my Kindle, and that works fine.

[schnidrig]

Thanks for the suggestion.
However I seriously doubt, that instapaper can do that. Sony periodicals are not just epub files. They need some additional Sony proprietary metadata. Ebook-convert can generate that metadata if you use recipes, however, that feature is turned off for regular html to epub convertion.

Since instapaper does not even mention Sony, there is little (if not to say no) hope that this will work.

Thanks anyway.

[kovidgoyal]

No, you have to use a recipe to acheive this.

[schnidrig]

Is there a technical reason for that, or can one expect this to be added some time in the future?

[kovidgoyal]

There's no technical reason, I just don't care enough about it to implement it separately. Be aware that for a file to be recognized as a periodical the extra markup is not enough, you also have to modify the ondevice XML db to tell the SONY to treat the file specially.

[schnidrig]

ok. Thanks for the info.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by schnidrig

Since instapaper does not even mention Sony, there is little (if not to say no) hope that this will

I'll take your word for that. As I said, I have never tried it myself. It works well for the Kindle, but I suppose that's a simpler format.

[drewvonadasmith]

Hi,

It's really a drag that I can't convert my .PDF magazines and load them to the Sony as periodicals. You mention using "recipes". How do I do this?

Thanks!
Drew

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

No, you have to use a recipe to acheive this.

[Manichean]

Recipes are short code snippets that tell Calibre how to download news from certain web sites- in effect, they define news sources. There's a manual page describing the news feature.

[drewvonadasmith]

So this will not allow me to download my PDF magazines and convert them to Sony periodicals? If not. is there anyway to do this? This seems to be a very frequent request, but I cannot find a clear answer.

Originally Posted by Manichean

Recipes are short code snippets that tell Calibre how to download news from certain web sites- in effect, they define news sources. There's a manual page describing the news feature.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by drewvonadasmith

So this will not allow me to download my PDF magazines and convert them to Sony periodicals? If not. is there anyway to do this? This seems to be a very frequent request, but I cannot find a clear answer.

The clear answer is "No, you can't do this." If you want to do it, you will have to write the code yourself. It won't be easy and it probably won't work for multiple sites.

Recipes can handle web pages and EPUB formats only. I have seen some attempts to handle pdfs where the structure of the pdf is well-known in advance, but they haven't been very successful.