Until recently, Mobipocket had a pretty huge advantage over competitors—its ability to turn RSS feeds into Mobipocket files and auto-sync them to a mobile device.
As promised, I’ve been working on an easy way for everyone to turn RSS feeds into ePub, and the feature is now fully ready on Feedbooks development server.
Thanks to the REST API that we’ll also release this summer, it will be very easy for developers working on devices or software supporting ePub to add support for this: a simple GET request to a resource like /user/id/subscriptions.xml will respond with an XML file listing all your subscriptions (including a link to the ePub file).
Moderator’s note: Here’s a sample file—the one shown in the above screenshot—demoing RSS-to-ePub. Click here or on the screenshot for a more detailed view of the file as displayed in Adobe Digital Editions.- DR.
Related: Feedbooks’ page turning RSS feeds into PDF files. Please note that it isn’t currently working with TeleRead’s RSS feed, but I’ve reported it to Hadrien. – DR.
Update, 10:30 p.m.: "Regarding the PDF output," Hadrien wrote earlier in the day, "I’ve completely changed the PDF output for Feedbooks in the new version. It’ll work with Prince XML now. I’ve just downloaded TeleRead’s feed in all 3 formats (PDF, ePub & Mobipocket) and they all work perfectly well." Confirmed on the one feed I tried (while in the members’ mode). The trick is to wait long enough for the conversion to happen. Hadrien is working on speeding things up dramatically. Try the conversion yourself. Your speeds might be faster—help Hadrien and give him feedback.
And speaking of ePub: Global Reader going ePub, in MobileRead, and the source article in Publishers Weekly. It’s great to see various arms of the Holtzbrinck conglomerate getting into ePub.
Great work, Hadrien!
[…] Update: Teleread also mentioned this upcoming feature. […]