Automatic Chapter Splitting of epub Books

[frimipiso]

Hi,

I would like to convert large epub ebooks into mp3. I could manually split these books chapterwise into articles and
convert these but this is very time consuming.

The chapter information is already present in epub, so textaloud should have no problems identifying them. Is there any
automated way of splitting an epub ebook into chapters and converting them into mp3? Or would that be possible using html?

Please not the I cannot use regular expressions to identify chapter beginnings from the text itself.

I think this would be a great feature for textaloud since you could then automatically generate audiobooks from unprotected epub
ebooks.

Thanks,

Jens

[Jim Bretti]

Hi Jens

The File Splitter utility in TextAloud 4 has been updated to support splitting ePub documents by chapter names. TextAloud 4 is still in beta, see the forum at viewforum.php?f=18 for details and instructions on downloading the latest beta

[frimipiso]

Hi Jim,

perfect! So you got another beta tester

Another request/question: Would it be possible to automatically inserte {{split}} tags into an article for every
subchapter (i.e. one level below the chapter level)? This would make it perfect!

Thanks,

Jens

[frimipiso]

Hi Jim,

I just installed the TA4 beta and tested the epub file splitting which works nicely. However, I have the following points/issues:

1. A lot of dummy chapters (about 60) were created at the end of the book. Is there any way to do a batch delete of the articles (e.g. highlight a sequence of articles in the left article window and press delete)?

2. The articles are split into top level chapters and subchapters at the second level which is great. The top level chapter articles have the same name as the corresponding chapter. But the second level subchapters have a name "base output name" + sequence number even though I selected "Name splits using document chapter" in the splitter UI. What can I do to actually have the document chapter name also at the subchapter level?

Thanks,

Jens

[Jim Bretti]

Hi Jens,

Thanks for giving the beta a try. Is it possible for you mail me a copy of the ePub document so I can work on the second level chapter names? If you can send it, please mail to me at jim@nextup.com

We are planning to implement the ability to select multiple articles and delete them. It is not implemented yet, but should be available in one of the next updates.

[frimipiso]

Hi Jim,

the epub file has a size of 30Mb so I cannot mail it. It is a DRM free
file which has been personalized to my name.

Can I upload it anywhere?

Thanks,

Jens

[Jim Bretti]

Do you have Google Drive, Dropbox or another cloud storage account? If you can upload the document to a service like this you should be able to upload the document, email me a link (jim@nextup.com), and remove the document from cloud storage when we're done.

[frimipiso]

Does the chapter splitting also work with pdf files?

Thanks,

Jens

[Jim Bretti]

Currently it works for epubs only. We hope to improve pdf support in future versions.

[Jim Bretti]

Jens, an updated version of the TextAloud 4 beta is available that includes support for ePub subchapters. I tested with the document you sent and it seemed to work. See the forum post at viewforum.php?f=18 for link to download the latest TA4 beta installer.

I also changed the split logic to exclude items in the ebook not contained in the table of contents. Typically there are only a very small number of these items, like the book dedication and few other things, the document you sent had a very large number. I think they were all extra pages for some image content. So the file splitter will ignore these now, and I'll add an option later to include this kind of content if necessary.

[frimipiso]

Works like a charm now!

Thanks

Jes