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Some of us love fanfiction. Again, some of us don’t — so if you happen to be one of those, you probably won’t find this post of any interest to you. On the other hand, if you are interested — read on.
Today, will all these fancy ebook reading devices it’s really hard to keep yourself sticked to your monitor and reading from the websites such as fictionpress.com, fanfiction.net and so on. I felt that it is rather annoying too, so that’s why I’ve developed a fanficdownloader — a library, which helps to download fanfiction stories from multiple websites (list includes fictionpress.com, fanfiction.net, fanfictionauthors.net and others). Well, it was cool and all that stuff, but people didn’t like it (which is by no means surprising as end-users tend to like GUI applications rather than Python libraries with a clumsy CLI interface). So I went a step further…
… and developed fanfictionloader. Shortly, this is a web service, which does two things:
- Allows to download stories from all these different websites and convert them to industry-standard ePub or good old HTML using a very simple web interface
- Stores these stories for you (and you only) so you can always download them later.
So, if you want to read stories, say, in Stanza (which, surprisingly, supports ePub and supports it really well), your actions are pretty simple:
- Go to fanfictionloader and paste a URL of the first chapter of the story (only multi-chapter stories are supported at the moment). Before you get to the application, you must need to log in using your Google account (why you need it — you’ll understand later on).
- Click “Download” (you may need to provide your login and password for the website you’re downloading from).
- After link appears, don’t click on it but rather click on Previously downloaded fanfics link and make sure, that your story has appeared in the list. This list contains stories which were downloaded by you — and only by you.
- Go to your Stanza iPhone app, and add a new Source (like it is described in Stanza FAQ — for example, in bookworm section) with URL
fanfictionloader.appspot.com - Go to your newly added sources, login (again) with your Google account and click on the Previously downloaded fanfics. All your books are here. Download them.
Beauty of this approach is that you can download stories while you’re at your computer — and add them to Stanza later on, when you actually need them. Anyway, if you feel that something doesn’t work in the way it should — just ping me a mail/comment/tweet, I’ll be right here.
P.S. It’s been my pet project for a long while and finally I decided to make it public. If you find it interesting and want to contribute to it, please let me know. Please also let me know if you terribly miss some functionality (say, you want to support some other website which isn’t supported yet) — let me know too.
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This is brilliant! I’ve been doing this manually since I got an iTouch and it’s been very annoying. Your app works well. Thank you!
Great – glad you like it! I keep improving it so stay tuned!Sent from my iPhone
Hey I’m not sure if it’s me or the server but I keep getting an error message whenever I try to go to the website. Thanks!
It seems like working for me! What your browser says? Can you add a screenshot?
Thanks for the tutorial, always fought with getting them on my IPod, now it's easy as pie :D
No problems – glad it works for you!
Sent from my iPhone
fanficdownloader is a great program. Oh, that I had found it years ago (well, it didn't exist years ago, but still…). Thank you so much for your hard work. It is greatly appreciated.
I think I may've worn your system out though – I keep getting empty fics (always 4kb in size).
Hi Sue — thanks for kind words; could you send me fics links you're trying to download, I'll try to work it out!
Wow I have to say this is pretty awesome. Someone just pointed me toward this site, and I thought I'd check it out, although I haven't actually tried it yet.
I have a question though, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, because really I'm just curious. But have you had any authors complain about this programs of yours? I certainly can imagine that some might not be comfortable with the idea of other people downloading and keeping personal files of their work, especially if they have plans to publish or something like that. Although it's not as if a person couldn't just copy and paste the file themselves, this just saves a ton of time and hassle. So I was just wondering what the general consensus among fic authors would be on this subject.
As a reader, this is obviously a wonderful tool. Especially since I do a lot of my reading on my ipod touch away from home. Being able to compile a fic and read offline would really open up my options.
So anyway, thanks again. I'm interested to see how this turns out…
Ravyn
Hi Ravyn,
Never did have any complains — mainly because fanfiction is done for fun only, as well as this program — no money are being made in the process. So, I don't think there ever will be any complains, but if they will — I'll certainly action on them.
Thank you for putting this together. I'm stuck & wondered if you could help me out. I've downloaded my fanfic & I'm trying to get it into the stanza iphone app. I've added the new source & I get an error that says: Catalog Error Error reading catalog data. Please try again later. It never asked me to log in with my google account. Thank you!
Hey Shannon. I would imagine this could be a problem with Stanza itself — out of the top of my head, did you try to remove the app and then re-install it? It could (theoretically) help; then you can actually add a new source and it will (may) work.
I got the same problem, and it was because I had added the book source as a catalog instead of a web page.
Hi Roman,
Thankyou so much for this lovely helpful and simple utility.
Now that the flattery is over, I have a couple of requests/suggestions…. would it be possible to date stamp the list of previously downloladed fanfics, because you have to download the whole thing from scratch each time a chapter updates, and it's impossible to know which version in the list is the most recently created?
If there was a way to just download new chapters that would be great, but I can't actually see how myself… and it's no big deal since it's so easy to download the lot anyway.
I have one more request…. is there any way you could add twilighted.net to your list of sites to be able to download from?
Thankyou again for the utility!
Hey,
Just wanted to let you know how much in love I am with this program :] I use it pretty much EVERY day in stanza on my iPod touch. and its pretty awesome.
One thing though, but it might be stanza itself and not this is that not for some reason, the stories are being downloaded by the name "file" and then the author name instead of the title. Not really sure why.
But anyway I simply loveee your program! Thank you sooo much for creating it! It makes reading soo much easier on the go!
I just discovered this great app today. Saved me a ton of time putting some fanfic onto my iPad.
For folks who are running into trouble transferring the files, try using Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/). I was able to download the epub files to my Mac and let Calibre handle the rest. I'm using the iBook app instead of Stanza so I'm not sure if that's making the difference.
Thanks for this great tool!
I love this program SO much!! Can't thank you enough – it's so easy to use and does beautiful epubs for Stanza. Two questions: one, is there a way to make it do PDFs? And two, is there someway I could make a small donation? ;-) Fantastic work, really!
this is great- if you could add an option for pdf i dont have the superlatives to describe how amaxing that would be.
Congrats on the excellent app. I did pull the python files and try it out. Works great but like you said, but most of us are lazy and prefer to cut n paste rather than do alot of extra typing. That being said, I noticed when I downloaded the python files that you mentioned something about possibly making this into a Mac OSX app. I would greatly like to see that happen as I am a Mac user and there are very few apps that are available with regards to fanfiction.
Before the iPad I was pulling all of my fanfic down into text and converting to .lit as I like being able to format my text font & I read it on an HP iPaq. Now I either have to convert everything from .lit to .epub or re-download everything. Your app makes it alot easier!
I also found that I don't like Stanza as much as a reader on the Mac but that FireFox has a plugin that works extremely well –> http://www.epubread.com/en/.
tried to make it an OS X app, but too much hassle if you feel like it, grab sources and off you go! :)
Just want to add another thank you to the chorus: your downloader has made my fanfic reading much easier. Any chance it could be made to work with academyofbards.org? Thanks again!