NRC (Dutch newspaper) offering ePub version

[Nvidiot]

NRC now offers (aside from PDF for the iliad) ePub versions of it's newspaper. It includes all the articles but no ads, nor does it include the stock exchange information.

It is free if you already have the 6-day paper version, or you could purchase the web edition, which sets you back €84.50 for a year. They offer a 6-week trial for free as well.

You can download the paper from 3PM every day, except Saturday, which will be available at 7AM.

Best of all, no DRM on their ePaper versions, so if you want to convert it to another format, you're free to do so!

Trial document (to see the layout etc) can be found here: http://epaper.nrc.nl/downloads/nrc_20090909.epub
More information: http://epaper.nrc.nl/

Looks like eBooks are starting to take off in the Netherlands

[quisvir]

Sounds great! Has anyone managed to make a Calibre recipe for it yet?

[JvdW]

Originally Posted by quisvir

Sounds great! Has anyone managed to make a Calibre recipe for it yet?

You can't make a recipe for the epub version since it is behind a login and is already a 'newsfeed'.

What you can do is use the rss feeds of nrc.nl to turn those into a news recipe. I have done it and its straightforward.

Regards,

Joop

[quisvir]

The login shouldn't be a problem for Calibre right, as it's just a matter of using the right url and cookies? There isn't a 'real' login with user/pass combination, just a personal URL.

Also, the rss feeds only cover part of the paper. The opinion section for example - in which I'm very interested - doesn't have a feew.

I would love to be able to schedule Calibre to download the epaper each afternoon, and have it upload it automatically to my reader when I connect it. Is there really no way of doing this? Or should I be asking this question in a different topic

[JvdW]

The login shouldn't be a problem for Calibre right, as it's just a matter of using the right url and cookies? There isn't a 'real' login with user/pass combination, just a personal URL.

The recipe system can probably handle this if you use Advanced/Custom processing, or else use wget to download it and use calibredb to upload it to Calibre.

Also, the rss feeds only cover part of the paper. The opinion section for example - in which I'm very interested - doesn't have a feew.

Yes, I know. Using a bit, lot, of custom processing it should be possible to scrape the frontpage and subsequent pages instead of using the rss feeds.

I would love to be able to schedule Calibre to download the epaper each afternoon, and have it upload it automatically to my reader when I connect it. Is there really no way of doing this? Or should I be asking this question in a different topic

That might be a different topic altogether.

Just a personal question:
Are you also posting to tweakers.net because I'm having almost the same discussion about downloading nrc epub and getting it into Calibre.

I had a good look through the code of Calibre to see what the difference is between a news 'book' and a regular book but can't find anything obviously different.
Just setting a tag to News on a regular book doesn't make it into a news book, neither does fiddeling with author etc.
Even in the database I can't find what differentiates a news book and a regular book so it looks like maybe it is something that is stored elsewhere.

If we can figure out what makes these news 'books' special in that they are uploaded automatically then it should be possible to add a regular book and have it uploaded automatically too.

Kovid? do you want to explain, please?

Regards,

Joop

[quisvir]

Originally Posted by JvdW

[..]
Are you also posting to tweakers.net because I'm having almost the same discussion about downloading nrc epub and getting it into Calibre.

Yes that's me. Funny how you ask a question in different places and end up talking to the same people

Thanks for thinking with me, by the way. Wget was a good suggestion, that should work to cover the downloading. As you, I've been trying to understand how Calibre handles ebooks with the news tag, and/or recipes (still unsuccessfully). Now let's hope Kovid can enlighten us either on how to have Calibre auto-upload ebooks added through calibredb, or on how to to the whole thing in a recipe. Maybe we should ask in the recipe thread, but I'm afraid to do more crossposting