Install

📥 Install¶

Two ways to use it, do not confuse them: - As an agent skill (the /book-to-skill command in Claude Code, Copilot CLI, Amp, or Codex) → git clone into your skills folder (below). This is what gives you the slash command and the full convert-a-book flow. - As a standalone CLI (just the text extractor) → pip install it from the repository, then book-to-skill --help. This does not register the agent skill; it only installs the extraction engine. See the CLI section.

The skill follows the open Agent Skills standard, so a single install works for any compatible host.

One command, any host — the skills CLI resolves the repo, detects the root SKILL.md, and installs the complete skill (including scripts/extract.py and tools/) into the skills folder of every host you select:

npx skills add virgiliojr94/book-to-skill

Prefer a manual install? Every per-host git clone path below works exactly the same.

GitHub Copilot CLI (personal skill):

git clone https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill.git ~/.copilot/skills/book-to-skill
# then, in a `copilot` session:
/skills reload
/skills info book-to-skill

Or the cross-agent path that Copilot CLI, Amp and Codex all discover:

git clone https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill.git ~/.agents/skills/book-to-skill

OpenAI Codex reads ~/.agents/skills and follows symlinks, so the clone above is all it needs. A local checkout works too, linked in rather than copied:

ln -s /path/to/book-to-skill ~/.agents/skills/book-to-skill

Claude Code:

Copy this into your Claude Code session:

Install book-to-skill: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill/master/SKILL.md

Or manually using standard git clone (ensures modular engine files are fetched correctly):

git clone https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/book-to-skill

Then in any agent session:

/book-to-skill ~/path/to/your-book.pdf
# or
/book-to-skill ~/path/to/your-book.epub

Standalone CLI (pip)¶

Installing the CLI with pip is a separate, optional path. It installs only the text-extraction engine as a CLI, for scripting or to grab the optional extractors; it does not register the /book-to-skill agent skill (use the git clone above for that).

book-to-skill is not on PyPI yet, so pip takes the package straight from the repository:

pip install "book-to-skill[pdf,epub,docx] @ git+https://github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill.git"
book-to-skill ~/path/to/book.pdf --mode text  # or: python -m book_to_skill ...
book-to-skill --check                          # report which extractors are installed

[html] is heavier than the others. It pulls in trafilatura, which brings a full HTML-processing stack (lxml, a date parser, a timezone database, a URL classifier — 17 packages total) to do real main-content/boilerplate detection instead of just stripping <script>/<style>. Worth knowing before installing on a constrained machine — the bs4 fallback (no [html] extra needed) still works, just without boilerplate removal.

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