Fic eBooks

When I got my Kindle, I already knew about Calibre. When I installed Calibre, I was underwhelmed because there wasn't any way to fetch the kinds of things I wanted. I had to go grab and concatenate everything manually, and when it's a 40 chapter fic, that is a LOT of effort.

I looked around, and finally came up with FanFictionDownloader.net. [no association, just mentioning the specific place because it was hard to search for "download fanfiction" without a bazillion false positives. There is a mac program out there but I couldn't try that] There may be other programs out there, but there are at least 2. There is also a GreaseMonkey scriptlet, but I can't seem to get those to work without thrashing my browser. I got my copy of FFD via CNET which vouches for there not being malware included. I ran it through 3 malware detectors before I installed and a spyware detector afterward and got no alerts.

What that does is take a fic URL, go out and grab all the chapters of that fic and concatenate them into HTML. If you also have Calibre installed (and told FFD where it is) you can also have it convert formats. Only certain sites are supported, and there are very few features. But does include .mobi output.

This can be transferred manually using the USB cord or emailed.

I added my @free.kindle.com email address to my gmail contacts. So after the fic is grabbed and converted, I attach the file in gmail and send it to "kindle". (This eliminates the need to give the Calibre program my password and that makes me a feel a lot more secure.) You can attach several documents to one email and the Kindle splits them up just like you'd want. Then, when I remember, I have my Kindle connect via wifi. Sending via the @free address means that I will not be charged data transfer fees.

I have converted fics manually by adding them to my Calibre library, but the FanFictionDownloader program automatically does the meta tags for author and title so there is a lot less effort. Also things I have converted manually have UTF errors (where there are "?" in place of every apostrophe or special character), and I don't know whether there is a Calibre setting to fix it.

I hope this information helps someone else. If you have other tools to grab and convert fic, I'd love to hear about them.