Tuesday 20 December 2011

Phrack ebook

I've converted all 25 years of Phrack magazine into an ebook suitable for viewing on e-readers:

phrack.mobi (Kindles)

phrack.epub (Other e-readers)

The conversion wasn't perfect; text and code are fine but some of the ascii diagrams have been horribly mangled. I outright stripped base64-encoded tgz/png. This is a work in progess; I will update it whenever I feel like some heart-withering text-processing.

If you would like to roll your own version, download the epub generation code or the mobi version. They should run on all *nix distros with the requisite Perl modules. Both versions actually generate epubs, but the second can be easily converted into a .mobi using Kindlegen.

Redistributed with permission. Rights remain with Phrack.org


update #1: I have manually added issue 68 to the download. The generation code should work once Phrack updates p68.tar.gz

update #2: Fixed a zip layout mistake that broke compatibility with Stanza

update #3: eridius restructured the .epub so it should genuinely work in all e-readers now.

15 comments:

  1. the links aren't working :(

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  2. Damn, it works fine for me. I appended &browserok=true, maybe that will fix it.

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  3. I can't access the files either even after logging in to google.

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  4. I've uploaded the generation code to http://albinowax.users.sourceforge.net/phrackgen.zip

    You should be able to use that to create the book directly.

    Any suggestions for where to upload the mobi/epub to?

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  5. Have you tried out Calibre?

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    1. Yes! This was my original approach. I had to do a fair bit of preprocessing to get calibre to run on it at all, then it ran for 10 hours then crashed :) I don't think it likes the scale.

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  6. Just like to say thanks for doing this - now have them all on my Kindle, brilliant result! Cheers.

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  7. The epub doesn't work, stanza says 'phrack': Unknown file format for 'phrack': Required container.xml file missing from zip download-2

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the report, it should be fixed now.

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    2. Thanks for the update, stanza now hangs on opening the epub & eventually crashes out, the crash happens much sooner on ibooks upon opening

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    3. Ack. This is probably just caused by the immense size of the ebook. Not much I can do about that other than split it into several smaller ones, which would be less convenient.

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    4. Instead of splitting it into multiple EPUBs, you could try using separate .xhtml files, one per issue, instead of one monolithic .html file. You've already got a separate navPoint for each issue, just make each one of those the start of a new .xhtml file.

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  8. Thanks for posting this. epub reader handles it on Win7 without crashing, but many of the chars turn into ice-blocks [ ]

    http://epubreader.info/

    ( epubreader installer pumps a lot of stuff into Windows ).

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