A lot of good technical books live on the web as a table-of-contents page with one HTML page per chapter. Free books, official language guides, long tutorial series, and documentation "books" built with mdBook, Sphinx or GitBook all follow this pattern. They read fine in a browser. On an e-reader they're a pain: you'd have to save every chapter by hand, stitch the files together, fix the order, and then get the result onto the device.
This post walks through a workflow that handles the whole thing in a few minutes with two features E-Ink (e-ink.me) added recently: Whole book mode and Send to Kindle.
Only do this with content you're allowed to keep a personal copy of: open-licensed books, docs under permissive licenses, your own writing, and so on. Respect each site's terms.
Why not just "print to PDF"?
PDF is a fixed page. A 6- or 7-inch e-ink screen has to zoom and pan through it, and code blocks become tiny. EPUB is reflowable: the reader picks the font size, long lines wrap, and the table of contents becomes real navigation. For anything you plan to read rather than print, EPUB wins.
The catch is that turning 40 web pages into one EPUB with a sane TOC is tedious work. That's the part to automate.
Step 1: find the table-of-contents page
You want the page that links to every chapter in reading order. Typical candidates:
- the "Contents" or "Table of contents" page of an online book
- the sidebar index page of an mdBook or Sphinx site (often the book's landing page)
- the index page of a multi-part tutorial series
Pages that list chapters as plain links in order work best. A JavaScript-only menu that appears after a click is harder for any tool to parse.
Step 2: let the tool detect the chapters
On the E-Ink homepage the converter has three tabs: Single page, Multiple pages and Whole book. In Whole book mode:
- Paste the table-of-contents URL.
- Click Detect chapters. You get the book title and a chapter list ("N chapters detected").
- Uncheck what you don't need: forewords, changelogs, "about this book" pages, index pages. Select all is there if you want everything.
- The button shows the price before anything runs: 3 credits per chapter, with a cap badge for long books. New accounts get 10 free credits, so a short series fits in the free tier and longer books cost a few cents per chapter (pricing).
- Confirm. Progress shows as
done/total chapters. Chapters that fail are refunded automatically.
When it finishes you download the EPUB. If you close the dialog without saving, you can regenerate the same book for free within 24 hours, so a misclick doesn't cost you anything.
Trimming the chapter list is the most useful step here. Documentation books tend to include pages that make sense in a browser and are pure noise in a book (search pages, "edit this page" stubs, API index dumps). Removing them before conversion keeps the TOC clean and the cost down.
Step 3: push it to the Kindle without a cable
Amazon's Send to Kindle has accepted EPUB since 2022, and current Kindles open those files natively. E-Ink now has a Send to Kindle button, so you don't have to download the file and email it to yourself.
One-time setup:
- Find your Kindle's email address (
something@kindle.com). It's in Amazon's Manage Your Content and Devices → Preferences → Personal Document Settings. - In the same section, add E-Ink's sender address to the Approved Personal Document E-mail List. The Send to Kindle dialog has a "Copy sender address" button and a link to Amazon's settings.
- Save your Kindle address in the E-Ink dashboard under Send to Kindle, so you don't have to type it again.
After that, hit Send to Kindle and the book shows up on the device a few minutes later, as long as it's on Wi-Fi. Each delivery costs 1 credit.
Step 4: check the result on the device
A few things are worth a quick look on the first book from a new site:
- Code blocks. Long lines wrap on small screens. If a book is code-heavy, try landscape mode or a smaller font for those chapters.
- Images and diagrams. They come through, but dense diagrams can be hard to read on a 6" screen. You can preview the EPUB in the browser first with the EPUB e-ink preview tool. It simulates Kindle and Kobo screen sizes in B&W or 4-level grayscale.
- Title and author. Some sites put the site name in the page title, and that ends up on your Kindle shelf. The EPUB metadata editor fixes title, author, language and description locally in the browser before you send.
Automating the single-page part
If you prefer scripts, the regular web-to-EPUB conversion is also available as a REST API (POST /api/v1/convert/webpage, Bearer key, documented at e-ink.me/en/developers). Pass several URLs and they're merged into one EPUB. That works well for a cron job that bundles a weekly reading list. Whole-book detection with chapter selection is a UI feature for now.
A note on reading breaks
If you're working through a long technical book on an e-reader, short breaks work better on the same device than on a phone. There's a set of free browser puzzle games built for e-ink screens (Sudoku, Nonogram, Minesweeper and others, with no animations to smear the display) that run in the Kindle's experimental browser.
Summary
- Find the table-of-contents page.
- Use Whole book mode on e-ink.me and trim the chapter list.
- Set up Send to Kindle once, then deliver with one click.
- Preview and fix metadata if the book is going to sit on your shelf for a while.
It takes a few minutes instead of an afternoon of copy-pasting, and you end up reading the book on a screen that doesn't buzz.
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