via @mikecane (again)
I adore Mike…he is funny, interesting, curmudgeonly…and he keeps turning me on to new tools for ebooks, e-readers and e-publishing. The absolutely newest is at grabmybooks.com.
He heard about it from an epub goddess named Liz Castro. This is the first I have heard of her, but apparently she is important in the field. Nate Hofelder from The Digital Reader posted about it too…and pointed out that if @mikecane was ranting that should tell you how good it is. To top it all off, Mike tested it on a new free web-based ebook by J. Neil Schulman who I met at the Heinlein Centennial.
I sent Mike a note and he sent me back the files, since he already had them grabbed and formatted. I just had to figure out how to open them properly and voila’ I have an epub of I Met God by J. Neil Schulman.
That’s the long way around to say that this is the coolest thing since sliced bread. My work computer wouldn’t let me download Calibre, but the file opened fine in Firefox, and I will eventually figure out how to read it on my Kindle. The site has a video (which would be more useful if there were sound) and a link to the User’s guide, which even I figured out without much prompting from Rebecca, who is the GA on duty tonight.
It’s now going on 9pm and I need to accomplish some things. I don’t feel guilty about spending time on this, because I am on the tech subcommittee of the Staff Development and Training Committee and GrabMyBooks will not only get the content from a webpage, it will also let you combine several pages into one. You can also pause the collecting midstream and edit the content to fix the more annoying formatting errors and generally clean up the files. It will also accept RSS feeds as a source.
Have fun, everyone.
