Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow in eBook Format

9 points by markschoonover ↗ HN
I just finished a project to convert SE data-dumps into draft PDF eBooks, which I'm calling SE2go. SE2go eBooks are interactive, they contain all the original links within the question and answer body, original formatting (as much as possible), and are sorted by tag and question title. Also included are links back to the original question, and the meta data important to each question and answer.

Any comments or unaccepted answers are not included in the eBooks. The page size of all eBooks are formatted to be easy to read on a 7” reader or tablet, include any embedded graphics and highlighted syntax. Using SE2go on larger displays is also supported without any degradation in quality.

The Stack Overflow has the largest number of questions and accepted answers, the Posts.xml file is >20G. To convert the entire Stack Overflow site into a single eBook was just off the hook; it made an eBook that was not user friendly, so the best working idea was to create separate tag based eBooks.

The first set of draft eBooks are built from the Stack Exchange data dumps of 3Q/2013. Current plans are to release another set of drafts after community input. Right now the only format available is PDF but depending on community input other eBook formats (epub, Nook, Kindle, etc) can be done. There's a short survey to see what the community would like.

I've posted draft PDFs here: http://se2go.ka6wke.net.

3 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] thread
I'd prefer ePub format over PDF.
That's next after I get source code detection improved.
I love this idea! The only thing bothering me is the font on the code snippets. I don't know if its a google doc thing, but the font used in the snippets makes code a bit of a chore to read.