I’ve been looking around for an epub format of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures Bible so that I can read it on my magic using aldiko.Unfortunately, I can’t find anything. Actually, I already have an application for that Bible separately but it would really be nice if I can read it on my Aldiko app because of the features I mentioned on my previous blog. I’m really eager to read the whole bible completely so I decided to make my own epub format. And what I really want to achieve is the proper formatting of verse numbers.
Using Sigil, a WYSIWYG ebook editor, I learned that the epub format is just a formatted HTML. So my first plan is to convert the text format bible I got from somewhere into an HTML. But there are 66 books in the bible containing thousands of chapters! Yeah I’m willing to go through this little by little. If I can work on 1 book a day, I could finish it in 2 months! Wow! Such determination LOL!
And so I started working, and the lazy (in a nice way) guy I am, I learned a few tricks that could speed up the process. But I was really lazy haha. I thought if only I could find a html format of this bible, then my life would be easier. And so I found it. On the http://www.watchtower.org website. I could view the source, copy the parts I need and strip off the excess HTML tags from the source. But still, this method is very time consuming. I can’t even got through the 20th chapter of the book of Genesis in 4 hours!
This is where my ultimate laziness (programmers are very lazy, LOL) really kicks in. I summoned httrack to mirror the bible from the web. I now got the .htm files in my PC. I just need to combine them into a huge .htm file altogether. I used my old friend Ultra Edit for this tasks. I stripped off the unneeded tags, comments, etc using Regular Expressions find and replace (really sweet!) and combined the files into a single clean .htm file and loaded it up to Sigil (which takes 5 minutes to load, 10 minutes to save as epub). Finally, I got my very own epub format of the New World Translation Bible loaded in Aldiko. What an achievement in one day (originally could have been taken in 2 months!). Just wow! I even learned some regex tricks on the process. So here it is, loaded in my HTC Magic.
Sometimes, it’s good to be lazy. Provided that you let your PC work for you automatically. 
If you are satisfied with the windows explorer then I say you’re missing a lot. If you’re like me who got tons of files to view, synchronize and organize to different locations, then I bet you sometimes felt that there maybe something missing with windows explorer.