This is a simple python3 script whose goal is to automate download of light novels chapters, clean the output, and write them to an epub file.

It relies on filesystem caching to store individual chapters and links to the next chapters, in order for both to be easily editable, as parsing the web isn’t an exact science.

You need to create both the books and cache directories before running this tool.

This script uses a configuration file (by default: books.ini) containing the required information for light novel series, with the following format:

[title-abbrev]
url = http://url-of-the-first-chapter.com/1/ (REQUIRED)
title = A title (metadata)
lang = e.g. "en" (metadata)
author = An author name (metadata)
auto = a boolean whether the book should be scrapped automatically when running without a parameter
filter = the name of a filter (defined in filters.py) (REQUIRED)

There can be any number of these sections in the config file.

You have to define filters for the sites you want to scrap, it’s usually a straightforward process (and most of those sites use wordpress anyway, so the structure stays the same).

Each filter is made of a few attributes, (of which two are required: the content selector and the next_chap selector).