Bookit plugin for Firefox

[jotheman]

now it suddenly and repeatedly crashes Firefox! Don't know why.

I sent a report to Mozilla via the Firefox Crash Reporter.

Cheers,


jo.

[graydw57]

Yeah, I'm having the same problem again, Firefox just vanishes.

No idea what I did last time to make it go.

Edit:
Hmm. I stopped Calibre, then converted a page - and it worked. Seems that every time I add something new, it starts a new copy of Calibre. Shouldn't it use the copy that's already running?

Just in case anyone is following this, I'm on an AMD-64 laptop, running Ubuntu 9.04, and Firefox 3.5.1, with Calibre 0.6.12

[beowulf573]

Sorry, been out with a bug for a week and didn't have the energy to do anything.

The ebook-convert is throwing an exception while converting that spiegel.de page, you might want to file a bug report against calibre. I tried it using just the command line tools from calibre and got the same error.

I've been looking into the lockup issue but haven't found a good solution. It happens sporadically and I can't seem to find anything obviously wrong with the code. I'll keep looking.

[dsuden]

I can confirm that here too. Firefox crashes when I try to get Bookit to "do its thing." Using Firefox 3.5.3 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, though I think this issue predated my installation of Snow Leopard.

[beowulf573]

Sorry for the delay in responding. We had the year checkup for my wife after her surgery (no cancer!) so we took a small vacation. Now I'm catching up on all the work I missed.

Give me this week to meet a deadline and I'll look at the plugin again. There's a lockup issue I've run into however I can't make it happen on demand or when logging is enabled. Typical.

[tamzilla]

I installed this plugin hoping I could use it to convert short stories posted at Subterranean Press and other online magazines to epub. I've been trying to use this plug in on several different computers, each running Windows XP with the latest version of Firefox and Calibre and I cannot get the 'selection to ebook' option to work on any of them. I always get a 'web2disk or save failed' error. I checked the file paths and have the enable threading option off. Any ideas on what I can do to get this to work?

If I convert the whole page to epub it works. However, this puts a lot of stuff in the file that I don't want.

Thanks!

[dsuden]

So glad to hear the news about your wife, Beowulf! And thanks for looking into the MacCrash thing.

[Harmon]

I've just spent a couple of hours trying to get Bookit 6.2 installed on Firefox 3.5 running on Mac OS 10.6.1. And I managed to do it.

But I had a couple of confusions I thought I'd memorialize, and wound up with a request I'd like to make.

First, the confusions.

I could not find Bookit using the Firefox add-on search popup. What's weird is that I recall FF asking me if I wanted to install it a couple of days ago, & I figured I'd get around to it this weekend so didn't accept the invitation. So how come it's not there when I search for it? Luckily, I knew Eddie had a web page so I got it there.

So I got Bookit installed, but it kept being unable to save. Ultimately, I figured out that I had to run Install Command Line Tools in the Advanced Preferences on calibre. That did the trick. But it's non-obvious.

Now for the request. It's not an "essential." It's just an "it would be nice." It would be nice if the save box on Bookit allowed the user enter Tags, along with the Title, Author & Filename, while the save box is on the screen.

[Amalthia]

Hi,

I'm running firefox 3.5.5, Calibre 6.24, and I'm on Windows XP.
This is the error I got when I used selection to ebook, and through the editor selection to ebook.

data:text/html;charset=utf-8,<code></code>

I'm not sure why I'm getting this error?

I was also curious, I could have sworn I saw somewhere in this thread there is a way to create a TOC using Bookit? Am I wrong about that?

I also noticed it's not possible to edit the selected text beyond adding attributes. I had planned to delete a few <br > tags but could not. I'm not sure if that's a bug or just the way the editor works.

Thanks for all your hard work putting this together!

[dsuden]

I have Mac OS 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) and Firefox 3.5.5, and can't use the Bookit plugin. There are two issues.

1. Preferences window for Bookit is not entirely visible...part of the window is chopped away (see image.)

2. Any time I try to get the plugin to make a file, Firefox crashes.

I should mention I've been trying to do the Mobi format.

Here's hoping there's a solution...boy do I miss Bookit!! :-)

Dane

UPDATE: I can now attempt book creation without crashing Firefox, after going into Calibre advanced and setting up command line tools...so we're closer! However attempts end in the following error...

[Gunnerp245]

@beowulf573

Firefox 3.5.6
Bookit 0.6.2
calibre 0.6.31

Get this error every time.

http://picasaweb.google.com/GunnerP2...16609683787218

Gunner.

[banjopicker]

I really miss this plugin. It hasn't worked for me in many months. Has it been abandoned by its author? Not that I would blame him. It must have taken considerable effort to keep it working through Firefox's and Calibre's many changes--I appreciate that he ever put the work into it and gave it to the community at all.

[jotheman]

I agree with you, bjp.

While BookIt was great when it worked, BeoWulf had to invest a lot of his free time to keep it working. No donations, no nothing.

Even if BookIt dies, I am still very grateful for your work, BeoWulf!

Wish you all the best,

jo.

[soilwork]

Today, I noticed several articles from my RSS feeds mentioning Instapaper. So I gave it a shot for about 30 min and it seems pretty good. It can be an alternative to Bookit plugin, at least for now.

It is fairly simply to use.
1. You can visit their website and register your email address, which is free AFAIK.
http://www.instapaper.com
2. Drag "Read Later" bookmarklet to a toolbar of your web browser
http://www.instapaper.com/extras
3. Whenever you come across an interesting articles, press "Read Later" bookmarket and it will be clipped to your account.
4. From Instapaper account, you can download unread articles either in epub or mobi format.

I am not related to Instapaper and I am just happy to save time and effort to format interesting articles by hand using BookDesigner or Sigil, which I have been doing so far.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre has a recipe for instapaper that will download all unread articles and make a single ebook out of them