LWN in EPUB format

[Posted January 29, 2025 by corbet]

For years we have had occasional requests to be able to receive LWN in a format for ebook readers. It took a while, but we are now happy to announce that all of LWN's feature content is available, to subscribers at the "professional hacker" level and above, in the EPUB format. To obtain the weekly edition as an EPUB file, just click the "Download EPUB" link in the left column. There is a separate RSS feed for the EPUB format as well. Any other feature content can be turned into an ebook by appending /epub to its URL.

We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit are available to all readers.

There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel free to drop us a note (at lwn@lwn.net) with suggestions.

Yay!

Posted Jan 29, 2025 17:10 UTC (Wed) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Fantastic! I use a Kobo Forma, and use Pocket. The Dropbox and Google Drive integration will make this easier, too.

I hope that you'll do some article in the future about how this new feature is implemented under the hood.

Responsive businesses are precious

Posted Jan 29, 2025 17:13 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

This is not something I have an interest in myself, but I love that LWN listens to and acts on feedback, without a scandal having to motivate anyone. It's rare in business, and something I really appreciate.

This is nice, open source?

Posted Jan 29, 2025 17:48 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

Is there any appetite to open source the LWN codebase now that you have more people in your team?

This is nice, open source?

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:06 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Appetite is there, as always, but we have a number of problems to deal with ahead of that one.

the many faces of epub

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:47 UTC (Wed) by dankamongmen (subscriber, #35141) [Link] (1 responses)

i found epub a somewhat frustrating format for creating content, but it can be made to work. if you're unconcerned with supporting older ereaders, that makes things a lot easier. sigil is a pretty solid tool. i didn't write my content in there, but it's very helpful as a (partial) validator. running things through calibre is also helpful, as it's something of a maximalist epub renderer. the single best linter i found was that embedded into amazon KDP's publication process. i wrote some notes here and here i believe to be both circumspect and up-to-date. have fun!

the many faces of epub

Posted Feb 6, 2025 18:20 UTC (Thu) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

basically there are two forms of epub:

* something that works with everything; this is what Calibre produces.
* something that passes epubcheck and can go on the Apple Store, d2d etc.

It would be nice if these were the same, but they are not in practice.

(Source: self-publishing two books and having to hand-edit XHTML.)

If you're selling books, you must pass epubcheck. Be prepared for extensive bug reports from your readers.

If you're not selling books, Calibre output will probably make your readers happier.

..........

Posted Jan 29, 2025 21:43 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Thanks :)
...... more characters

Thanks

Posted Jan 30, 2025 6:24 UTC (Thu) by jazzy (subscriber, #132608) [Link]

Really nice!

MD please?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 9:31 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (4 responses)

Might we convince you to support Markdown syntax in your comment editor?

MD please?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 15:42 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

It's something I've looked at occasionally. We don't want to implement our own markdown interpreter, of course, so the hard part is finding one that we trust enough to put on the front line in the site.

MD please?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 16:00 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

LWN accepts and validates HTML, so you could convert your markdown to HTML and then paste that in.

It seems to me that LWN wouldn't need to trust a markdown editor all that much... it would simply validate the HTML that it produces the same way it currently validates HTML.

MD please?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 18:09 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Nice. If I had some free time I'd simply teach Greasemonkey to inject that into LWN's comment editor.

It'd be somewhat more efficient for everybody concerned if @corbet did that on the server side, though. Famous last words, I know, but a "Markdown" button in the "Format:" header and a simple MD-to-HTML in, well, whatever language the LWN back-end is written in, can't be all that hard.

Famous last words, I know, but Markdown isn't rocket science – a markdown-to-HTML conversion is no more unsafe than a random-HTML-to-safe-and-boring-HTML filter. I'd be a lot more cautious if we'd be talking about RestructuredText.

MD please?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 19:13 UTC (Thu) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

I actually have a partially-written patch I'm working on to do exactly this. Doing it efficiently is not _quite_ as simple as it may seem, but I don't see any problems in getting this working eventually. All of us at LWN love to improve the site — we're just focused on working on articles first and foremost, leaving site improvement to be squeezed into the extra time between researching, writing, and editing. As you can see from the EPUB feature, though, we do get there eventually.

This is great news!

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:36 UTC (Thu) by jcul (subscriber, #171954) [Link] (7 responses)

I had played with getting LWN on KOReader before with the RSS feed, but it was a bit messy.

I'm exited about being able to sync epubs and read in peace away from devices!

This is great news!

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:40 UTC (Thu) by jcul (subscriber, #171954) [Link] (6 responses)

Note, I do not see the "Download EPUB" link on articles, but appending /epub seems to work well.

This is great news!

Posted Jan 30, 2025 12:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (5 responses)

My reading of the article is that the "Download EPUB" link is intentionally only provided on the "Weekly Edition" pages (even though /epub works more widely)

This is great news!

Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:39 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

I only put the link on the weekly edition because that is where I thought it would be used most; I didn't think there would be huge interest in EPUBs for individual articles, and though it better to avoid the clutter. That could change, of course, if I judged wrongly.

This is great news!

Posted Jan 30, 2025 16:56 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)

My way of reading LWN is: open the new article when it appears; click send2kindle browser extension to have it delivered to the e-reader; read the article in the evening offline.

It would be nice to have RSS feed with Epub articles, so I would be able to automate the above.

Waiting to read the articles in the Weekly edition does not work for me, because it is hard to participate in comments discussion. (Once again, "Unread comments" is the best thing ever),

Epub link on individual articles

Posted Jan 30, 2025 16:59 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

I can add the link easily enough, I'll put that on the list.

We had contemplated, FWIW, adding a new mailing list to get EPUBs automatically, possibly to a different email address than is normally associated with the account. The idea was to make the "send to Kindle" thing work as easily as possible. Would that be a useful feature?

Epub link on individual articles

Posted Jan 30, 2025 20:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Very useful!

This is great news!

Posted Jan 31, 2025 9:08 UTC (Fri) by jcul (subscriber, #171954) [Link]

Oh that makes sense, my mistake for misreading.

It does make sense on the weekly edition, and anyway it's really easy to grab individual articles if needed from the epub RSS or by appending epub.

If I was scripting something to grab interetsing articles then that's trivial.

Thanks again

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 11:19 UTC (Thu) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link] (6 responses)

Hello,

lately I have been using https://readwise.io/read for all my RSS feeds and for all my e-books. I'd love if I could trivially integrate the LWN weekly edition there. It would be nice for the epub to appear automatically there...

But in the mean time, having some sort of token-based RSS feed for me to add there would be a nice addition too.

Cheers,

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:41 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (5 responses)

There is an RSS feed for the EPUB version of the Weekly Edition; is that not what you are looking for?

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Jan 31, 2025 7:26 UTC (Fri) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link] (4 responses)

Happy to try out that RSS feed to see whether it works, where can I get the link? (I don't find it)

But I have some doubts:
- the RSS integration expect the typical RSS feed where the content is embedded in the feed, I'm not sure it would give a good result with a link to an .epub file
- how would it work for the featured articles if the RSS feed is not tied to my subscription ?

Thanks.

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Jan 31, 2025 12:51 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (3 responses)

The feed providing the EPUBs is here, and all of our RSS feeds are listed on our syndication page, which admittedly is a little hard to find if you do not already know to go looking for it.

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Jan 31, 2025 14:05 UTC (Fri) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link] (2 responses)

Thank you. But unfortunately those feeds only work if you are logged in and the Readwise servers do not have my cookie obviously.

I get to see this:
> Thank you for your interest in LWN content in the EPub format. That is, however, a feature that is reserved for LWN subscribers at the "professional hacker" level or above. Please consider subscribing to LWN or upgrading your subscription to gain access to this feature (and many others) and, most importantly, to support LWN's continued existence.

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Feb 7, 2025 5:59 UTC (Fri) by ewoodrich (subscriber, #129308) [Link] (1 responses)

Agreed, I have the same issue and some kind of token subscribers could append to the feed url would be great.

Integration with Reader by Readwise ?

Posted Feb 7, 2025 14:40 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

So I'm a little confused, I think. The feed should be working just fine. I don't know Readwise, but I take it that it is trying to automatically download the epub files from the feed? I can see how there might be a problem there. So you really want the token for the epub download, not the feed itself?

Is there an OPDS feed?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:03 UTC (Thu) by manutr (subscriber, #160165) [Link] (1 responses)

I tried to add the rss feed to foliate, but it seems, it expects OPDS..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Publication_Distributi...

Probably something a lot of other ebook readers also expect..

Is there an OPDS feed?

Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:42 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Interesting, I hadn't even heard of OPDS. Will look into it.

Looks good from a Pine Note running Debian

Posted Jan 30, 2025 16:03 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

Firefox makes *getting* to the download link a bit annoying, but that's minor. The Content drop-down disappears if you lift up, so you have to drag the pen/finger down. I doubt if it's anything on your side.

Thank you

Posted Jan 30, 2025 17:36 UTC (Thu) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544) [Link]

That is just mighty cool, I have been starting calibre once every week to download and to convert the weekly edition for my e-book reader for ages.

Fantastic!

Posted Jan 31, 2025 13:33 UTC (Fri) by elw (subscriber, #86388) [Link]

This is really great! I have always wished I could get the weekly edition sent to my Kindle and now it looks like this might be one step closer to reality.

I wonder if Calibre has the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed and email articles to a Kindle address. If not, I may have to try my hand at writing a small utility that can.

Thanks!

Posted Feb 1, 2025 14:50 UTC (Sat) by Che0t (guest, #125738) [Link]

That is a really nice feature to have

KOreader news feed?

Posted Apr 24, 2025 21:12 UTC (Thu) by janfrode (subscriber, #244) [Link]

Anybody got this to work with KOreader?

I can get it to download the initial index, but not the full epubs. It fails with message about "Unsupported format in: https://lwn.net/headlines/weekly_epub (Reason: Failed to download content). Please review your feed configuration file."

Maybe I somehow need to add my username/password? Tried doing it as basic auth, but that didn't seem to work. Any ideas?