book-reader_skill

Overview

This skill reads and searches digital books (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, TXT) and exposes their structure for fast, precise answers. It extracts text, detects table of contents and page/chapter locations, and caches processed books to speed repeat queries. Use it to find quotes, navigate to pages or chapters, or pull text for further analysis.

How this skill works

On first use the skill extracts the book’s text, metadata, and table of contents, then caches that representation. It detects pages or chapters depending on format and watches the source file to invalidate the cache when the file changes. Searches are ranked with a BM25 algorithm so results are returned by relevance and include precise location references (page, chapter, or offset). Commands support info, toc, read, search, and full-text extraction.

When to use it

• A user supplies a book file and asks factual or contextual questions about its content
• You need to locate an exact quote, passage, or citation quickly
• Navigate directly to a specific page, chapter, or section within a book
• Extract text for note-taking, summarization, or downstream processing
• Conduct topic research across one or more digital books

Best practices

• Provide the original file to ensure accurate page and chapter references
• Use the search command for broad queries and read with page/chapter flags for precise reading
• Rerun extraction after editing source files to refresh the cache
• Prefer EPUB or PDF when accurate TOC and page numbering are important
• Combine extraction with downstream tools for indexing, summarization, or citation management

Example use cases

• Find and copy a memorable quote from a PDF for citation in an article
• Show the table of contents of an EPUB to identify relevant chapters before reading
• Jump to page 42 of a technical manual and extract that page’s text for review
• Search a corpus of textbooks for occurrences of a term ranked by relevance
• Extract full text from a book for offline processing or import into an annotation tool