Stuck at home, library's closed, and a kid who loves to read running out of books...what to do? How about an e-book with curated articles from Wikipedia.
This is a script I threw together to turn a list of Wikipedia articles into an ePub file that can then be loaded into your favorite eReader. It is built on a couple excellent Python modules with some additional code for processing a configuration file to define the book's content.
Currently the best installation method is to clone the repository and use Poetry to create a virtual environment and install the required modules.
git clone https://github.com/akehrer/wikipub.git
cd wikipub
poetry install
poetry shell
To use the script pass a TOML based definition file (see below) as the only argument and watch your book get made.
python wikipub.py example.toml
Some optional arguments are available to override the default behavior:
-o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
File name and path to save ePub file.
-t TITLE, --title TITLE
Alternate title to use for the file name instead of
the one defined in the configuration file. This does
not overide the 'output' option
Unless an output location is specified, the finished book will be saved in the same location as the definition file.
The definition file is a TOML configuration file with the following sections.
[book]
title = "Radio Controlled Vehicles"
author = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc."
cover_image_url = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Hyper8.jpg"
The title and author values are required with the title value also being used to define the file name of the output file (unless overridden). The cover_image_url value is optional and will be used to add a cover image to the book.
[[chapters]]
title = "Radio Control"
[[chapters]]
title = "Radio-controlled model"
[[chapters]]
title = "Radio-controlled aircraft"
...
One or more chapters section should be included to define the Wikipedia articles to use for each chapter in the book. Each chapter is defined by the title value of the Wikipedia article.
See the included example.toml file for an example book definition file.
This script currently does not output Amazon Kindle files (.mobi) but the ePub files it makes can easily be converted to Kindle using Calibre.
Thanks to the following Python modules and authors for making this insanely easy.
- Wikipedia Book Creator - This service provided by Wikipedia makes collecting articles into a book easy but currently does not have a good export to ePub option.
- MediaWiki to LaTeX - This service says it will convert a Wikipedia book to a pdf file, but I was not able to get it to work for me either through the web interface or a local Ubuntu installation.
Bug reports, pull requests, and all other contributions are welcome!