---
title: "Offline Reading"
date: 2026-01-19
language: en
topics: ["blog", "book", "literature", "programming", "technology", "writing"]
source_url: https://willem.com/en/2026-01-19_offline-reading/
---
# Offline Reading

*Exporting blog posts from HTML to ePub and PDF*

> This year marks the 10th anniversary of my blog. What started as an experiment has evolved into over 170 stories, averaging around 60 thousand pageviews a month. I recently started translating posts into Dutch, German, and Spanish, expanding the reach. And now I am introducing support for offline reading by making all posts available as ePub and PDF downloads.

![Read willem.com posts on your favourite e-reader (like Kobo or reMarkable)](https://willem.com/global/images/4d22a1a0de33.webp)

## Why Offline?
Enjoy distraction free reading on e-ink devices like a Kobo or reMarkable which are kind to your eyes. Focus on the articles wherever and whenever you want as they are available as downloads that work offline and DRM-free. All willem.com ePubs and PDFs contain high quality images and feature beautiful resizable typography. I made a handy overview of ePub and PDF downloads here:

[action1]

## How it works
The willem.com website runs on the [Lemmid](https://willem.com/en/work/lemmid/) content management system that is a static site generator, outputting optimised HTML suitable for high volume traffic and international distribution. I extended the NodeJS code to automatically export to ePub and PDF by using simplified HTML as input. See the source code snippets below: for **ePub** I use the [epub-gen](https://github.com/cyrilis/epub-gen) module; for **PDF** I use [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) and [LaTeX](https://www.latex-project.org). I made a task manager that queues output jobs for individual translations and file formats, spreading computational load on the backend.

## Conclusion
The reactions I have received on my posts come from all over the world and they inspire me to keep writing. With ePub and PDF support I hope to expand my reach even further by enabling more ways to read the articles. Enjoy!