A long time ago (in Internet time, anyways), Scifi.com had a section called Scifiction, where they published science fiction stories online—both “classics”, from writers hoary with age (well… maybe not that hoary; Robert Silverberg, Avram Davidson, Barry N. Malzberg, etc), and “originals”, from newer writers (you know, like Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, M. Rickert, etc).

Then, for whatever reason, Scifi killed Scifiction. All links to the stories were evaporated.

But the Scifiction archives live on. Horribly slow, badly formatted, aging and uncared for, and nearly unreadable in mobile readers like the Kindle, but still there. (Of course, I’m inserting extra drama here. Cue timpanis.)

I got tired of this, so I created eBooks of them, one per year. This was actually my second serious endeavor in the world of eBooks. It was amusing, because the archives are huge; some 325+ stories reside there, spread out over five years. I can’t distribute them, of course, because the stories are all under copyright—and tracking down over 50 writers, some dead so I’d have to contact their estate, is not something I’m about to do. Nor would they wish me to, I think. So I don’t distribute them, and never will.

But the knowledge of how to do it, for people who wish to make personal eBooks, is distributable.

So here’s a description of how I did it, after the cut. It’s not complete in every detail, because some of the process was manual—there are multiple pitfalls in how the archives work, a lot of it because the archives are spread out over five years, and templates and presentation change enough to cause unwary scripts to die with gurgles halfway through the work. And even so, you end up needing to massage things by hand anyways.

Note: this is quite a bit of effort, but it was still less effort than doing it all by hand. I’m rather proud of this. And, of course, it’s a very tl;dr, mid-level technical discussion. I think it’s mostly a geeky thing.

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