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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 – MagicAndi Jan 8 '11 at 21:54
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    Very cool idea Greg... thanks for this resource. – Jeff Fritz Jan 8 '11 at 21:54
  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43074/… – systempuntoout Jan 8 '11 at 22:00
  • what about pdf fomat? – Andrei Jan 9 '11 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 '11 at 3:07
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    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 '11 at 4:11
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    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 '11 at 5:23
  • Using Calibre is explained on the mobileread.com forum mobileread.com/forums/… – Kristof Neirynck Jan 9 '11 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 '11 at 22:04
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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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