This tool lets me turn any website into an ebook

The only advantage of having an e-reader is that you will never need to read anything on a regular screen, if you want to. You can read manga, graphic novels, or comics on an e-reader. You can configure your eReader to automatically update with RSS feeds. You can even read websites as e-books on your e-reader. Let me show you how.

What is Caliber and how to install it

Caliber is an essential tool for anyone who owns an e-book reader. It allows you to create a library of ebooks, edit them and send these ebooks to your ereader after automatically converting them into a format best suited for that ereader.

However, Calibre’s most powerful feature is its ebook editor, which allows you to create new ebooks or reformat them. Using the editor we can download HTML pages and format them as an ebook. The editor can also add metadata, cover image, table of contents, change fonts, etc.

You can download and install Caliber on just about any desktop platform: Windows, macOS, or Linux. I will be using a Windows machine for this demo, but the interface is identical on all platforms. Start by downloading the installer package for your platform and installing it on your desktop.

Download the web page or website and load it into Caliber

The easiest way to download a web page is to use the browser’s built-in features. Most browsers allow you to save a web page as an HTML file. For example, on Firefox, you can open any website, right-click anywhere, and click “Save Page As” to save that web page as a stored HTML file. Each web page will become a page of the ebook.

If uploading a website page by web page is too tedious, there is a way to automate this process. You can use the command line terminal to copy an entire website to your PC. The command line tool for this task is called “wget”.

Open Command Prompt, type the following command and press Enter.

wget

If you get an input field in response, it means wget is already installed on your machine and working. However, if you get an error, you need to install wget first. You can do this by typing the following command:

winget install wget

Once wget is installed, you can save a copy of any website to your local disk using this command. You can replace the website URL in this command with the URL of your target website.

wget -r -l inf -P -A html, htm https://quotes.toscrape.com

The wget utility will save HTML files in the directory where you are currently running the commands. After that, the pages are ready to import into Caliber.

Convert it to ebook format

Launch the Caliber app on your desktop and look for the green “Add Books” button in the corner. In the drop-down menu for this button, you will see an option to “Add Empty Book”. Click on it. You will be asked to give the book a title and provide the name of an author.

The new book will now appear in the Caliber library. Select it and click the purple “Edit Book” button in the corner to open the Caliber editor. Here we can import the saved web pages as ebook pages.

You can import HTML files by clicking the File menu and selecting “Import Files into Book.” Select the HTML pages you want to import as pages and click “Open.”

You can click any HTML page in the pane to preview the eBook output. The central panel provides you with HTML code that you can edit to format or modify the text. Under the Text tree, you can also rearrange the order of HTML files to change the order in which these pages appear in the book.

Once you’re done, all you have to do is click File > Save and save the EPUB file. You can then send this EPUB file to your e-reader or preview it in Caliber.

Bonus Formatting Tips

I’ve already mentioned that you can edit HTML to format text, but Caliber has handy editing tools to speed up this process. You can import downloaded fonts to change the default font of your ebook. You can also create a table of contents for your book (Caliber has a button to automatically generate tables of contents using title tags).

Caliber also lets you change how text is aligned. You can find and replace text or add images for comics or graphic novels.

Finally, you can upload a cover image for your ebook. Go to Tools > Add Cover > Upload Image.

You don’t need to rely on your Kindle’s bulky browser to read websites. You can simply turn them into ebooks and browse them offline. Caliber has everything you need to create high-quality ebooks and send them to your e-reader.