steward VS web

Hey I did this, too! I forgot until just now :)

https://github.com/phuff/epub_builder

I built it because I wanted to have something that made a daily brief news paper that was personalized and sent to my kindle. It makes an epub and uses kindlegen to convert it to a .mobi. There's a lot of fun epub formatting stuff you can do.

Here's the system that makes the daily newspaper, but it's been so long I'm not sure it's actually functional code outside of my production version:

https://github.com/phuff/steward

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; likewise it's not possible to accept money without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal. (Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things doesn't mean you can't run your web app on a single tiny server, and that outsourcing the basic underpinnings of your web app, like the OS, runtime, and database to some cloud service, or that resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, will result in complexity and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

Hey a little later to the party here but I'm really enjoying this. I started reading a book with it and while I agree with others it's not great for grammar it certainly shows me many new words without requiring me to read at a glacial pace.

PS: You should def try to include some books from https://standardebooks.org/ which are much nicer formatted than the ones you're using from Project Gutenberg.

Good luck and I hope you can keep building this out. Already the update to tap anywhere to close the word definition is a nice improvement :)

A number of e-book platforms are discussed on my blog, which dives deeply into the technical nuances of typesetting a few[1]. Ultimately, I typeset a classic from Standard EBooks[2], Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde[3].

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

[2]: https://standardebooks.org/

[3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

As an aside, for anyone looking for free classic books to read on their various eReaders, these are very well done: https://standardebooks.org

It is the same when you download a kepub book from standardebooks.org. You will have the epub file with kepub features.

> https://standardebooks.org/

Standard Ebooks is seriously impressive. One of my favorite sources of books in the public domain.

I’d also add in addition to this excellent list of DRM-free ebooks, it’s always worth looking into borrowing a book from the library via Libby/Overdrive.