RSS-wise, is there any "accumulating" / persistent / offlining RSS client?
I read a fair amount of serials these days, and while most notify updates over RSS (though not necessarily with a full-text feed), neither generic RSS clients nor offline readers (e.g. pocket, instapaper, …) are really built for multi-updates works, the ability to browse across chapters, re-read a work, …
I guess an option would be to collect updates into ebooks, but there it's not quite clear how various epub readers handle updates (e.g. can I point the reader towards a URL and it'll check for updates on its own, do I have to update manually, do updates only work through proprietary storefronts?)
I don't know if I failed to explain things correctly or if you just missed it, but that certainly does not seem to help much.
The core issue is not partial feeds, it's — as the first paragraph describes — the ability to collect and collate feeds into persistent offline-available books (for lack of a better word).
Having full-text feeds don't really do anything when the feeds are still ephemeral, mixed together, to be sent to a separate reader for any sort of offline permanence, and basically unavailable for later (also offline) re-reading. The RSS feed of a serial is a way to get update notifications, it's not a feed of articles which become outdated once you've read them.
I think RSS are the wrong starting point for such a task. They may syndicate limited content, may contain ads, etc. So I guess you want to collate the posts rather than the feed entries themselves.
Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web service called Crofflr. (Notice Crofflr seems to be under no active dedelopment, but in my experience it just works). I guess Instapaper offers a similar service, but I never tried it. You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or other read-it-later service) part with tools such as If This Then That. Hope this helps.
> I think RSS are the wrong starting point for such a task. They may syndicate limited content, may contain ads, etc. So I guess you want to collate the posts rather than the feed entries themselves.
Certainly.
> Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web service called Crofflr.
Interesting. That is sort of the things I've considered, however each serial's feed really is a single work being updated (mostly append-only I guess, I don't know how many serials authors go back and significantly rework previous entries) and I don't know how well epubs and their clients deal with updates / additions (without intermediate proprietary storefronts).
I really need to knuckle down and play with epub, seeing how googling around doesn't seem to yield anything useful.
> You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or other read-it-later service) part with tools such as If This Then That.
"RSS to pocket" isn't really the issue, going through my RSS feed, reading the regular entries and sending the serials to pocket isn't much of a drain / difficulty. The issue is mostly that serial entries can accumulate rather fast in pocket (especially for those with small frequent entries e.g. one of the defunct serials I used to follow would publish a page per day), and so pocket is a mess of interspersed normal articles to read later and chapters from dozens of serials. Because of that I regularly find out I've skipped chapters.
Could you explain what you're thinking of? Because I went to check it out and it looks like an aggregator service with a desktop client (which I don't have a use for) and some basic services like search & offline reader integration & a builtin offline reader?
I read a fair amount of serials these days, and while most notify updates over RSS (though not necessarily with a full-text feed), neither generic RSS clients nor offline readers (e.g. pocket, instapaper, …) are really built for multi-updates works, the ability to browse across chapters, re-read a work, …
I guess an option would be to collect updates into ebooks, but there it's not quite clear how various epub readers handle updates (e.g. can I point the reader towards a URL and it'll check for updates on its own, do I have to update manually, do updates only work through proprietary storefronts?)