I’ve started having The Economist delivered to my e-reader using Calibre. It’s a centre-right publication but it’s got a good reputation and I think it’ll be good for me to read a non-left perspective on things, and a non-newspaper format and style of writing.

The most recent issue of the magazine is available for free to be scraped, which is great.

This turned out to be easier said than done because the Economist free recipe requires some features of Python 2.7. On Debian Squeeze this is how you backport those features:

,# apt-get install python-pip
,# pip install ordereddict

and then change the include line at the top of the recipe:

from collections import OrderedDict

becomes

from ordereddict import OrderedDict

The script is very similar to my Guardian one:

,#!/bin/sh

nice -n 19 ebook-convert /home/swhitton/lib/economist_free.recipe /tmp/economist.mobi
calibre-smtp --attachment /tmp/economist.mobi --relay localhost my_email_here my_kindle_email_here ""
rm /tmp/economist.mobi

Best run as a cron job on a Friday morning, apparently.