book-reader

Read books (epub, pdf, txt) from various sources with progress tracking.

Purpose

Enable AI agents to read full-length books for learning, summarization, and knowledge extraction.

Features

• Multiple sources: Anna's Archive, Project Gutenberg, local files
• Format support: EPUB, PDF, TXT
• Progress tracking: Remember where you left off
• Smart chunking: Read books in digestible sections
• Summary generation: Extract key insights as you read

Tools Required

• curl or wget - Download books
• pandoc - Convert EPUB to text (optional, fallback to python)
• pdftotext (poppler-utils) - Extract PDF text
• Python 3 with ebooklib and beautifulsoup4 (for EPUB parsing)

Usage

Search for a book

./book-reader.sh search "Thinking Fast and Slow"

Download a book

./book-reader.sh download <book-id> [output-file]

Read a book (with progress tracking)

./book-reader.sh read <file> [--from-page N] [--pages N]

Show reading progress

./book-reader.sh status

Installation

# Install dependencies
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils pandoc  # Linux
# brew install poppler pandoc  # macOS

pip3 install ebooklib beautifulsoup4 lxml

# Make executable
chmod +x book-reader.sh

Book Sources

1. Project Gutenberg (70k+ public domain books)

   • API: https://gutendex.com
   • Free, legal, no DRM

2. Anna's Archive (shadow library)

   • Millions of books, papers, comics
   • Legal gray area depending on jurisdiction
   • Use responsibly

3. Local files (your own epub/pdf collection)

Reading State

Progress tracked in ~/.openclaw/workspace/memory/reading-state.json:

{
  "currentBook": "Thinking, Fast and Slow",
  "file": "/path/to/book.epub",
  "totalPages": 499,
  "pagesRead": 127,
  "lastRead": 1770957900,
  "bookmarks": [50, 200],
  "notes": "Interesting insight about System 1 vs System 2..."
}

Example Workflow

# Find the book
./book-reader.sh search "Daniel Kahneman Thinking"

# Download it
./book-reader.sh download 12345 ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub

# Start reading
./book-reader.sh read ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub --pages 50

# Continue later
./book-reader.sh read ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub --pages 50

# Check progress
./book-reader.sh status

Privacy & Ethics

• Public domain books (Gutenberg): Fully legal
• Copyrighted books: Check your local laws
• Consider buying books you find valuable to support authors
• Use for personal learning, not redistribution

Limitations

• PDF OCR quality varies
• DRM-protected books not supported (by design)
• Large PDFs may be slow to parse
• EPUB formatting may be imperfect in plain text

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Use responsibly. Support authors when possible.