Update (20 Feb 2014): It looks like the Maxwell Institute changed their website and the script no longer works. It’s fixable, but I don’t know when I’ll get around to it.

The code is available here.

A Python script to generate epub ebooks from the books made available online by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. I wrote this to make ebooks from the available Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, but it will work for any of the books on the website. When you run the script, it will ask you for the bookid from the book’s url. For example, for Temple and the Cosmos, http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=103, the bookid is 103. Alternatively, you can pass the bookid directly as an argument, e.g.

python GetBook.py 103

The script requires that you have Python (2.7, not 3.x) and µTidylib installed. (If you have a Mac or Linux box, Python is probably installed already. Apparently µTidylib is a pain to install on a Mac though.) This is a work in progress, so let me know what problems you run across.

I’ve had a number of requests for the epubs themselves. I don’t know whether or not it’s legal for me to distribute the generated epubs, so I’m not doing so at this point.