I made epub and mobi versions. Download here. They contain links to all original posts, so anyone who wants to look at comments can click on the title of each post to do that.
A large number of posts have extraneous > characters. The affected posts appear to be either SSC posts in which the > character appears at the start of a blockquote and LiveJournal posts in which the > character appears after and in between paragraphs. Examples of the former include “Meditations on Moloch,” “Misperceptions on Moloch,” and “Book Review: Red Plenty,” while examples of the latter include “The Meditation on Creepiness”, “The Meditation on Superweapons,” and “The Meditation on the War on Applause Lights.”
Also, the title of “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalitiebs” should be “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities”. I normally wouldn’t report a typo, but this one appears to have been introduced by the ebook process; the mistake is not in the original article, nor is it on the list of titles RobbBB provided.
I have noticed one more issue. In “Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…” the symbol “£” is twice corrupted into “ÂŁ”. This is not an ebook-wide problem, since “Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs” and “A Modest Proposal” both use the correct symbol. Apparently this is simply a problem with the source; the copy of the post at the Effective Altruism Forum has this error, but the copy of the post at LessWrong, has the correct symbol.
I actually went through every post and manually copied out the relevant part of the html code. Then I pasted everything into my text editor (fun fact: vim got quite slow handling the >3mb html file, but emacs handled the task really well) and cleaned it up, replacing all
’s with
and such. Then I put all the pictures into a folder and changed the references to point to my local files. Then I put it into calibre to create the epub and mobi versions.
In retrospect, I should have just written a script to do all that because it took way too long. The script would have had to handle the different sites differently (especially the livejournal stuff is pretty messy), but it would have been so much faster. Like seriously.
Created an account at Instapaper and used their bookmarklet individually on each article.
Used calibre to download the articles from Instapaper and convert them to an ebook (instructions here).
Edited the title and other metadata in calibre to make the ebook more relevant and presentable and converted it to epub/mobi formats.
Note that I had to use the Instapaper bookmarklet starting from the last article and going backwards because calibre downloads the articles in reverse chronological order.
I don’t think this is ideal, though, because the comment sections of some of these articles are good enough to be included in the reading but Instapaper only retrieves the article post, leaving out everything else. If anyone has a better suggestion, do share :)
Thanks, Ricardo! In MIRI’s ebooks, we’ve tried linking to the comments section at the bottom of each article. Then people can click through to a website featuring the comments if they’re interested; but the ebook itself isn’t bloated by the size of the comments sections.
Any chance of a combined ebook version?
I made epub and mobi versions. Download here. They contain links to all original posts, so anyone who wants to look at comments can click on the title of each post to do that.
Do let me know if anything’s massively broken.
Thank you! The book is fantastic. Combined with The Sequences ebooks that are already floating around (Eliezer Yudkowsky Blog Posts, 2006-2010: An Unofficial Compendium, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate) it is now possible for someone to get most of the insights of the rationalist community distilled into extremely efficient book formats.
A large number of posts have extraneous > characters. The affected posts appear to be either SSC posts in which the > character appears at the start of a blockquote and LiveJournal posts in which the > character appears after and in between paragraphs. Examples of the former include “Meditations on Moloch,” “Misperceptions on Moloch,” and “Book Review: Red Plenty,” while examples of the latter include “The Meditation on Creepiness”, “The Meditation on Superweapons,” and “The Meditation on the War on Applause Lights.”
Also, the title of “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalitiebs” should be “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities”. I normally wouldn’t report a typo, but this one appears to have been introduced by the ebook process; the mistake is not in the original article, nor is it on the list of titles RobbBB provided.
Well that’s embarrassing. Thanks for the info! Should be fixed now.
Everything looks fine now. Thanks once again!
I have noticed one more issue. In “Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…” the symbol “£” is twice corrupted into “ÂŁ”. This is not an ebook-wide problem, since “Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs” and “A Modest Proposal” both use the correct symbol. Apparently this is simply a problem with the source; the copy of the post at the Effective Altruism Forum has this error, but the copy of the post at LessWrong, has the correct symbol.
Thanks! Downloaded; I don’t know whether I’ll actually read it (it being apparently over 476,000 words), but it’s great to have.
Did you use the method RicardoFonseca described?
I actually went through every post and manually copied out the relevant part of the html code. Then I pasted everything into my text editor (fun fact: vim got quite slow handling the >3mb html file, but emacs handled the task really well) and cleaned it up, replacing all
’s with
and such. Then I put all the pictures into a folder and changed the references to point to my local files. Then I put it into calibre to create the epub and mobi versions.
In retrospect, I should have just written a script to do all that because it took way too long. The script would have had to handle the different sites differently (especially the livejournal stuff is pretty messy), but it would have been so much faster. Like seriously.
All right. Someone tell me if this is decent enough, please. I only did the first section: “Rationality and Rationalization”.
Dropbox folder
How I did it:
Created an account at Instapaper and used their bookmarklet individually on each article.
Used calibre to download the articles from Instapaper and convert them to an ebook (instructions here).
Edited the title and other metadata in calibre to make the ebook more relevant and presentable and converted it to epub/mobi formats.
Note that I had to use the Instapaper bookmarklet starting from the last article and going backwards because calibre downloads the articles in reverse chronological order.
I don’t think this is ideal, though, because the comment sections of some of these articles are good enough to be included in the reading but Instapaper only retrieves the article post, leaving out everything else. If anyone has a better suggestion, do share :)
Thanks, Ricardo! In MIRI’s ebooks, we’ve tried linking to the comments section at the bottom of each article. Then people can click through to a website featuring the comments if they’re interested; but the ebook itself isn’t bloated by the size of the comments sections.
Woah, awesome! I would love to see something like this for the whole collection.