The World Wide Web is rich with interesting articles, essays, and tutorials that are worth having close at hand. After 30 years of web history, it is now clear that sooner or later most web pages disappear.

This is why, in a previous Linux Magazine, I looked at how to create a private archive – viewable with any web browser – of full copies of all one's bookmarks using Shaarli and archiveBox [1]. Another helpful way to preserve the content you read online is to save it in ebook format, which is then viewable through an ebook reader. In this article, I'll introduce you to three different open source tools that convert web pages to ebooks, and I'll show you how to automatically save all the web pages you want as ebooks, by passing their URLs to a simple shell script.

Note that, in some jurisdictions, you might run into legal issues with downloading some content from the web – especially if you try to distribute or reuse it. This is not a legal article – it is about the technology. If you have any doubts, check the laws for you region and read the copyright or licensing notice for the web page.

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