When is a book, not a book?

I believe that I have been looking for this capability for a solid year, but I was only able to figure it out today. It can be described most easily as: Converting a folder of html files into a format that can be edited and manipulated by an LMS.

Before today, these were the things that I tried:

1. Creating an iFrame embed for each important file and reconstructing a navigation for those files
2. Linking to the files on a webserver and hoping for the best
3. Importing individual files to Google Docs and then fixing all of the broken images and links. (This allows for editing easily as long as you are signed into your google account, but it is a lot of extra work to create the files)
4. Researching the heck out of nearly every online hosting solution that integrates with an LMS to no avail.

Today, however, was a different story.

Today I found this.

It is a book module for Moodle, but really it is more than that. It is the single largest time saver I have ever run into. I can select a folder that I have uploaded to the Site Files and it will import all of the HTML, remake the relative links into links within the book itself, and rework all image files to work within the book. It creates a tree structure for the files. It allows you to print the entire book or only one chapter, and you can even export the entire thing as a IMS file (a standard format for elearning resources).

So, now I can go from HTML that has do be downloaded, edited offline, and uploaded again into a single editable (IMS compliant) book that can be enhanced with pretty much anything you can create on a webpage.

I can think of about a hundred different reasons why this is a good thing for teachers to be able to do with their content, but I will leave you with just one:

Download anything you see on the web as a webpage and add it to your book.

Literally, everything becomes importable.