FanFicFare: serialised stories to EPUB, and only the new chapters

Download once, then fetch only what is new

FanFicFare makes reading stories from various websites much easier by helping you download them to EBook files, and it was previously known as FanFictionDownLoader, also called FFDL and fanficdownloader. The name change is a small clue about where the project came from and how it matured. The core capability is large in scope and simple in execution: it downloads FanFiction stories from over 100 different sites into ebooks, with the list maintained in a wiki page. The feature that makes it more than a scraper is the second one in the list, the ability to update previously downloaded EPUB format ebooks, downloading only new chapters. A serialised story changes every week, and a reader who re-downloads the whole thing each time loses their annotations, their notes and any local edits, and spends bandwidth on chapters they already have. The incremental update avoids both. The remaining features round out the reading experience: getting Story URLs from Web Pages, so the tool can be pointed at a listing rather than at a specific story, support for downloading images in the story text, and support for a cover image.

Two ways to install, and one for images

The project is distributed in two shapes, and the choice between them is about where you want the workflow to live. The first is a Calibre plugin, available from within Calibre or directly from the plugin discussion thread. The second is a Command Line Interface, published as a Python package on PyPI:

pip install FanFicFare

Image processing uses Pillow, and the documentation gives a separate install for that path:

pip install FanFicFare[image_processing]

The extras marker is the detail worth noting, because the default install does not pull in the imaging stack, and image support is one of the features the project is explicit about. The Calibre route gives you a graphical workflow inside an ebook library you probably already use, while the CLI is the one to script. The project also states that other versions may be available depending on your operating system and that these are not directly supported by the author, giving Arch Linux as the example, where the latest CLI release is available as the fanficfare AUR package and it will install the Calibre plugin if Calibre is installed. The last piece of the distribution picture is negative and dated: as of late November 2019 the web service version is shut down, with details in the wiki home page.

Test builds, monthly releases, and the testpypi channel

The release cadence is documented in a way that helps you decide what to install. FanFicFare is released roughly every month, but new test versions are posted more frequently as changes are made. That is a good sign about the health of the project, and the numbers back it up: the recent releases are 4.62.0 from 2026-10-01, 4.61.0 from 2026-09-01 and 4.60.0 from 2026-08-01, one per month, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-10-19. The test versions are the interesting part for an early adopter. The test version of the CLI is uploaded to the testpypi repository and installed with an extra index url:

pip install --extra-index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --upgrade FanFicFare

and the test plugin is posted at MobileRead, the same forum where the plugin discussion thread lives. This is a sensible arrangement for a scraper, because site support changes when sites change and a user who has just discovered that a site is broken can install a build that already handles it. The packaging reflects the same long-running practical shape, with a fanficfare/ package, a calibre-plugin/ directory, an included_dependencies/ directory for vendored pieces, makeplugin.py and makezip.py for building the plugin artefacts, ini-order.py, version_update.py for the version metadata, and a tests/ directory.

Images, covers and update logs carry format caveats

The README is unusually precise about which output format supports which feature, and that precision is the difference between a tool you can rely on and one that surprises you. Support for downloading images in the story text is EPUB and HTML only, with the documented workaround being to download the EPUB and convert to AZW3 for Kindle, and the details of configuring images in stories and cover images live in the FAQs and in a post in the old FFDL thread. Support for a cover image is EPUB only, and the optional keeping of an Update Log of past updates is EPUB only. Read together, those three statements mean the EPUB is the tool's native, full-featured format. A Kindle user is running a conversion after the fact, which is a lossy and slightly awkward pipeline, and if your habit is to read on a Kindle, that is the part of the workflow to think about before you start. The HTML output exists too, and the CLI package metadata describes the project as a tool for downloading fanfiction to eBook formats, with the current manifest version at 4.62.11 and a Python floor of 3.7.

Where FanFicFare is the wrong tool

Three limits stand out. The first is coverage and fragility. The tool works for the sites it supports, and the list is a wiki page maintained by the project, but a site that changes its markup breaks the parser for that site until somebody fixes it, which is why the monthly-plus-test release rhythm exists. For a site outside the list, FanFicFare is the wrong tool and you want a one-off script or a different downloader. The second is the legal and ethical side, and here the tool is neutral. It downloads material that other people wrote and published, often without the author having intended it to be packaged that way, and the rules about what you may do with that material, and about redistributing the resulting file, are yours to work out. A tool cannot make that decision for you, and the absence of a web service since 2019 is not a licence to build one. The third is the fit. FanFicFare is for serialised fiction from web sites. It is not a general downloader, not a DRM remover, and not a way to get a book from a source that does not permit it. If your need is a private offline copy of something you are allowed to copy, this is the tool; if the legality is unclear, the tool's convenience is not an answer.

How this differs from writing a scraper per site

The alternative approach is the one most people start with, which is a small script per site that fetches the chapter list, downloads the pages and writes an EPUB. The difference in approach is where the maintenance burden lives. A per-site script is simple to write and completely under your control, and it does exactly what you need for that one site, but it breaks when the site changes, and it is your job to notice and fix, and it produces an EPUB with none of the conveniences FanFicFare has already solved, such as incremental updates that fetch only missing chapters, cover images, images embedded in the story text, or a format conversion path to Kindle. FanFicFare moves that burden onto a maintainer who ships a release roughly every month and pushes test builds more often than that, and it spreads the cost of supporting a site across every user of that site rather than concentrating it on whoever needed it. The price of the shared approach is the plugin architecture and the Calibre dependency for the graphical route, plus the fact that you inherit a general-purpose tool's behaviour rather than a script that does precisely your case. For a reader of many sites on the same platform, the shared approach wins clearly. For one site with a peculiar structure, a small script is often less work.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt FanFicFare if you follow serialised fiction on the sites it supports and want a local EPUB that can be updated incrementally, either from the command line or inside Calibre. Do not adopt it for sites it does not parse, and do not expect the Kindle path to be a first-class output, since the documented route is to download an EPUB and convert it to AZW3 afterwards. Before you set it up, read the supported sites wiki against the sites you actually read, and check the licence file yourself, because GitHub classifies the licence as one it cannot categorise and the terms for redistributed fiction are yours to work out, not the tool's.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. JimmXinu/FanFicFare on GitHub
3. README
4. Releases