Generating your own one-off informational ebooks

[TreborPugly]

I'm not sure which sub-area this fits into, so I'm going to describe some of the things I'd like to do and ask for either comments on the ideas or pointers to more appropriate places to discuss individual ideas. The common characteristic is that I've realized how powerful Calibre or Sigil can be in creating ebooks from just about any text, but none of the things I'm interested in doing are broad enough to be a "recipe" I think.

1. Make your own address book for reference on your reader. I'd be happy with just a read-only version of my address book from Outlook, or from an Excel based address list. I want to create something that is easy to read and searchable, but I don't want to buy an app for something for which I've got all the content already. (I don't care about adding addresses via my reader) The best implementation would be something that I could easily re-create on my computer whenever I want. The path I've thought of so far is dump to Word, format as I like and save as RTF or html, then use Calibre to convert it.

2. Same as above, but with a calendar. This is trickier because formatting is a big issue. But it would be useful just to have a list of items which I could search.

3. Dumped web sites. If there is a pretty self-contained web site with useful info or something entertaining, I'd like to dump the whole thing into an ebook that has working links. For example, the Calibre manual is both a wiki or an epub file (I haven't actually looked at the epub version to see what navigation is like). Is this done with a particular reusable tool, or individual?

4. Archived emails. Take all the emails I've dumped in a particular folder on Thunderbird, or with a particular tag in gmail, make them all into ebook format for reference on my reader.

I think this is all in the category of building your own ebooks out of your own content, and maybe more of a Sigil subject, but given how Calibre can do so many things automatically for you, I thought I'd ask here first.

Thanks!

[Starson17]

3. Dumped web sites. If there is a pretty self-contained web site with useful info or something entertaining, I'd like to dump the whole thing into an ebook that has working links. For example, the Calibre manual is both a wiki or an epub file (I haven't actually looked at the epub version to see what navigation is like). Is this done with a particular reusable tool, or individual?

You can do this with Calibre's recipe system.

For the others, dump to any format that Calibre will take, add to Calibre, then convert to the format your ebook reader needs.

[Ransom]

That's all fine, but how would you ever be able to search for the files you want on an e-reader once you had them on there? It seems like an iPad or similar tablet running an searchable database would be the much simpler route to take.

[TreborPugly]

Originally Posted by Starson17

You can do this with Calibre's recipe system.

For the others, dump to any format that Calibre will take, add to Calibre, then convert to the format your ebook reader needs.

Thanks. This is what I suspected, I'll have to do some playing around with the recipe system.

[TreborPugly]

Originally Posted by Ransom

That's all fine, but how would you ever be able to search for the files you want on an e-reader once you had them on there? It seems like an iPad or similar tablet running an searchable database would be the much simpler route to take.

You want to buy me an iPad?
Most readers have a search function. I think it would be easy to search for a person in a read-only version of my address book.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by TreborPugly

Most readers have a search function. I think it would be easy to search for a person in a read-only version of my address book.

I like the idea of having my address book on my reader.