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Further to a discussion over a year ago about Stack Overflow portable edition, I've since got a Kindle and have been working on this project again.

I got a fast new machine with lots of disk space, installed 64-bit FreeBSD on it, and now I can mmap() the whole >4G posts.xml file. That really helped to make this possible.

As a demonstration of what this can do, I've created an ebook (in Mobipocket format, compatible with the Kindle and hopefully everything else) of the SO questions with score 20 or more in each of the top 20 tags:

Stack Overflow ebooks

That page has some details about how the books are organised and how to navigate them (on the Kindle, anyway). Here's some screenshots (click to embiggen):


(source: hewgill.com)


(source: hewgill.com)

Source is on Github.

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  • 1
    Thanks Greg, very useful. +1
    – Tangiest
    Jan 8, 2011 at 21:54
  • 2
    Very cool idea Greg... thanks for this resource.
    – Jeff Fritz
    Jan 8, 2011 at 21:54
  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43074/…
    – systempuntoout
    Jan 8, 2011 at 22:00
  • what about pdf fomat?
    – Andrei
    Jan 9, 2011 at 1:02
  • Great idea. Was really interested in an epub version of these but saw they are available in mobi format only at the moment. However I found a mobi to epub conversion site that seemed to do a good job putting out an epub version of the PHP ebook. Works on my eReader so far. Might try a couple more.
    – nzbluefish
    Jan 9, 2011 at 3:07
  • 2
    If you've got an ebook reader that doesn't do Mobipocket format, then Calibre is a free tool that can convert between a wide variety of ebook formats.
    – Greg Hewgill
    Jan 9, 2011 at 4:11
  • 2
    Can you please include a photo with code? I've heard it looks really bad on many readers... Anyway, great idea. This can be particularly useful when you visit a place with no open internet connection (on no internet at all, like the army).
    – Kobi
    Jan 9, 2011 at 5:23
  • Using Calibre is explained on the mobileread.com forum mobileread.com/forums/…
    – Kristof Neirynck
    Jan 9, 2011 at 10:30
  • Not a real question.It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. ---- just joking Greg, awesome stuff you did :) Keep it up!
    – matcheek
    Jan 13, 2011 at 22:04

1 Answer 1

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I have made some improvements to these books:

  • Embedded images now included in books (there aren't many, but having them is a great improvement)

  • Minimum question score threshold now 10 instead of 20. The largest book is now java at 25 MB.

  • Question titles and user names are linked to the web site as required by the attribution requirements

  • User names, post date, and tags moved to the top of each entry along with the score, instead of at the bottom

  • Tags formatted inside [square] [brackets] to make them more visually distinctive

  • Links to specific answers now enabled

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