Readme (THIS REPOSITORY IS DEPRECATED)

Deprecation warning

This repsitoriy is being deprecated. No further changes will be done. You are free to fork it if you want to.

I had been fixing, rewriting and testing things for a new and improved version of Wattpad2Epub when, suddenly, everything started to break apart.

Investigating the new breaks I found out Wattpad has made changes to their page generation, adding most of the page content dynamically through JavaScript.

The simplest way to work around this would be by using the 'requests_html' python module, but it works by installing and manipulating a browser (chrome by default), and that is something I'm not interested in.

I had already lost most of my interest in wattpad to begin with, and this is the straw that breaks the camel's back, so there will be no more changes here.

What is Wattpad2Epub

Wattpad2Epub downloads and converts Wattpad books into Epub files you can use with your favorite ebook reader.

This is a command line program, so a basic understanding of the command line is expected (at least until a GUI is added (don't hold your breath on that)). If that's a problem for you, this may not be the program you are looking for.

Why Wattpad2Epub?

Wattpad doesn't offer an option to download a book. This forces you to remain online while reading, and use wattpad's application to access the stories.

Having those stories in epub format allows storing them as a backup, offline reading and self publication.

Requeriments

You will need python3. You can install it with brew in osx. For our main script you will need BeatifulSoup4 and ebooklib, you can install them with:

pip3 install BeautifulSoup4
pip3 install ebooklib

Running it

You can run the python script doing:

python3 wattpad2epub.py your_url_argument

your_url_argument should be your story URL, for example: http://www.wattpad.com/story/53207033-the-arwain-chronicles

Output

After the script finished, you will have your epub file inside the root folder, and it will be named in the format Title - Author .epub, for example: The Arwain Chronicles Book I - IceheartPhoenix.epub

On Wattpad's API

As of Dec. 2018m the API has been split into two part, a "public API" and a "private API".

Public API:

• Has been in beta state since 2015, and they warn that it's subject to change, which makes it unreliable. (2018)
• Does NOT provide a way to retrieve story or chapter text, making it unsuitable for Wattpad2Epub purposes. (2018)
• Needs double authentication (application + user). (2015-2018)

Private API:

• Has been moved behind a login for which the wattpad user account doesnt work and there is nothing to help you find out how to gain access or whether it's at all possible. (2018)
• Isn't publicized. Found it through a comment on Stack Overflow, which probably means it's not meant for external applications use. (2018)
• When the documentation for the "private API" was accesible it was incomplete, with some essential parts missing. (2015)
• There were some server failures during my tests. (2015)
• Couldn't find a reliable way to retrieve a full story text. (2015)
• Needs double authentication (application + user). (2015-2018)

Based on all this, I've given up on using the API at all, and chosen to keep parsing the HTML because it allows us to:

• Retrieve full story text (essential)
• Not require the user to authenticate (important)
• Not require application autentication (nice to have)