Ebookama

A small, extensible program to take the pain away from repetitive ebook wrangling

Installation

This program requires node.js and npm to be installed on your machine. Until we have time to put instructions here, head to Google.

Once you've got node and npm installed, you need to get this repository on your computer. Ways to do that, in order of goodness:

Fork this repo, then clone your fork to your machine (requires installation and understanding of Git)
Clone this repo to your machine (requires installation and understanding of Git)
Download the repo and unzip it. You won't be able to easily update the program when we inevitably fix all the bugs we never thought of.

Now that you have the program on your computer, you need to set it up. Don't worry, it's easy. Open the terminal or command line, navigate to this repo on your hard drive, and run the following command (the $ just means "type this in the terminal and press enter"):

$ npm install

Before you can do anything useful with the program, you'll ned to set up your config file. This involves simply copying sample.config.cson to a new file called config.cson.

If you want to run the amzn.js script (see below for reasons why you might), you'll need to download Kindlegen from here and put it in the root folder of this project. I'm not allowed to host and share it on GitHub.

That's it. You're done.

Usage & Customization

The basic command is as follows:

$ node dist/index.js "path/to/ebook.epub"

Customization

The fractured state of ebook production practices means that we all have our own way of doing things. This program is written with this fact firmly in mind. You can use Ebookama to do many things, if your JavaScript is up to it. The only places you need to write code are the following, everything else is take care of for you:

config.cson
modules/transformers.js
modules/util.js

Let's go through them one-by-one.

config.cson

TODO

modules/transformers.js

This is where you shine. Write any javascript you can think of here, within the following limitations:

Methods are categorized by filetypes: currently, css, html or xhtml, and opf. If your new method is under one of these properties in the transformers object, it will be run against all files of that type; and if it's not under one of these properties, it won't get called at all.
Every method receives one argument – the file it's getting run against, as a string. Every method must return one argument - the file it's getting run against, now modified (or not!), as a string.

There are some examples in there already. If you don't want to use them, get rid.

modules/util.js

Utility functions, for your transformers to use. I highly recommend that these be pure functions all.

Where does the name come from?

Ebook
Ebook automation
Kama Sutra

acstew / Ebookama