Book Reader - Learn & Grow Every Day

Read EPUB, PDF, or TXT books from multiple sources with progress tracking, smart chunking, and summary extraction for efficient learning.

Security Scan

The skill is internally consistent with its stated purpose (reading/downloading books and tracking progress); it has no unexplained credential requests or install behavior, but you should note a few minor missing dependency notes and legal/privacy considerations when downloading copyrighted material.

Purpose & Capability

The script and SKILL.md align with the stated purpose: searching Gutenberg, downloading EPUB/PDF/TXT, extracting text, and storing reading progress. Declared dependencies (pandoc, pdftotext, Python ebook libs) map to the code's EPUB/PDF handling. One small mismatch: the script uses jq for JSON processing but jq is not mentioned in SKILL.md or the registry metadata.

Instruction Scope

Runtime instructions and the script stay within the declared scope: downloading books (from user-supplied URLs or Gutendex), extracting text, and saving progress to a local workspace (~/.openclaw/workspace). The skill does not instruct reading unrelated system files or exfiltrating data to third-party endpoints beyond fetching book sources and calling the Gutendex API. It mentions Anna's Archive as a source but does not automate access to it (the script points users to the site manually).

Install Mechanism

There is no install spec (instruction-only), so nothing arbitrary is downloaded or executed during installation. Dependencies are installed by the user via OS package manager or pip per SKILL.md. This is the lower-risk pattern.

Credentials

The skill requests no secrets or privileged environment variables. It optionally respects OPENCLAW_WORKSPACE to change its storage location; otherwise it writes state under ~/.openclaw/workspace, which is proportional to its functionality.

Persistence & Privilege

always is false and the skill does not request persistent platform-wide privileges. It stores only its own reading-state file under its workspace and does not modify other skills or system-wide agent settings.

Assessment

This skill appears to do what it says: download books, extract text, and track reading progress in ~/.openclaw/workspace. Before installing or running: 1) Ensure you have the runtime tools the script actually needs — SKILL.md omits jq (the script uses jq for JSON parsing), and the Python EPUB path requires ebooklib and bs4/lxml if pandoc is not present. 2) Be mindful of legality and ethics: the script can download from arbitrary URLs and references Anna's Archive (a shadow library); avoid downloading copyrighted material unless you have the right to do so. 3) Review network usage policies: downloads come from Gutendex or user-provided URLs, so only use trusted sources. 4) The script writes reading-state.json in your workspace and may include file paths and notes — treat that as local data. If you need higher assurance, run the script in a sandbox or review the code locally before giving it files or network access.

book-reader

Read books (epub, pdf, txt) from various sources with progress tracking.

Purpose

Enable AI agents to read full-length books for learning, summarization, and knowledge extraction.

Features

• Multiple sources: Anna's Archive, Project Gutenberg, local files
• Format support: EPUB, PDF, TXT
• Progress tracking: Remember where you left off
• Smart chunking: Read books in digestible sections
• Summary generation: Extract key insights as you read

Tools Required

• curl or wget - Download books
• pandoc - Convert EPUB to text (optional, fallback to python)
• pdftotext (poppler-utils) - Extract PDF text
• Python 3 with ebooklib and beautifulsoup4 (for EPUB parsing)

Usage

Search for a book

./book-reader.sh search "Thinking Fast and Slow"

Download a book

./book-reader.sh download <book-id> [output-file]

Read a book (with progress tracking)

./book-reader.sh read <file> [--from-page N] [--pages N]

Show reading progress

./book-reader.sh status

Installation

# Install dependencies
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils pandoc  # Linux
# brew install poppler pandoc  # macOS

pip3 install ebooklib beautifulsoup4 lxml

# Make executable
chmod +x book-reader.sh

Book Sources

1. Project Gutenberg (70k+ public domain books)

   • API: https://gutendex.com
   • Free, legal, no DRM

2. Anna's Archive (shadow library)

   • Millions of books, papers, comics
   • Legal gray area depending on jurisdiction
   • Use responsibly

3. Local files (your own epub/pdf collection)

Reading State

Progress tracked in ~/.openclaw/workspace/memory/reading-state.json:

{
  "currentBook": "Thinking, Fast and Slow",
  "file": "/path/to/book.epub",
  "totalPages": 499,
  "pagesRead": 127,
  "lastRead": 1770957900,
  "bookmarks": [50, 200],
  "notes": "Interesting insight about System 1 vs System 2..."
}

Example Workflow

# Find the book
./book-reader.sh search "Daniel Kahneman Thinking"

# Download it
./book-reader.sh download 12345 ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub

# Start reading
./book-reader.sh read ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub --pages 50

# Continue later
./book-reader.sh read ~/books/thinking-fast-slow.epub --pages 50

# Check progress
./book-reader.sh status

Privacy & Ethics

• Public domain books (Gutenberg): Fully legal
• Copyrighted books: Check your local laws
• Consider buying books you find valuable to support authors
• Use for personal learning, not redistribution

Limitations

• PDF OCR quality varies
• DRM-protected books not supported (by design)
• Large PDFs may be slow to parse
• EPUB formatting may be imperfect in plain text

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Use responsibly. Support authors when possible.