book-to-skill

Overview / Description

book-to-skill is an open-source AI developer tool that converts a book or document into a structured, on-demand skill for coding agents, aimed at developers who want to give Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, or Amp an author's expertise without bloating the context window. Rather than producing a summary, it distills named frameworks, mental models, decision rules, and anti-patterns — what the project calls the author's toolkit — into a compact SKILL.md file that the agent loads only when a topic is actually relevant. It accepts PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML, Markdown, RTF, and common e-reader formats, and extraction runs locally with standard-library fallbacks, so books aren't uploaded to a third party. Because it loads only the relevant chapters on demand, token cost scales with the scope of your query instead of the length of the document. The tool speaks the open Agent Skills standard, which is what lets the same generated skill work across multiple agents instead of locking you into one. It is MIT-licensed and dependency-light, installs via pip, and has drawn 6,000+ GitHub stars and a multilingual contributor community. For engineers who want their agents to reason with a specific book's methodology while keeping context lean and data private, book-to-skill is a focused local extraction tool rather than a hosted summarizer.

Used For

Turning books and documents into compact, on-demand skills for coding agents, for developers who want author-level methodology without context bloat.

Pricing

Plan

Free

Free and open source (MIT license); installed via pip

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Plan

Free

Creator accepts optional GitHub sponsorships to fund maintenance

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Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Extracts frameworks, decision rules, and anti-patterns into a compact SKILL.md instead of a summary
  • Works across Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Amp via the open Agent Skills standard
  • Local extraction with standard-library fallbacks — books aren't uploaded to a third party
  • Loads only relevant chapters on demand, so token cost scales with query scope, not book length
  • MIT-licensed, dependency-light, pip-installable, with 6,000+ GitHub stars

Cons

  • Aimed at developers comfortable with the command line and pip — not a no-code product
  • Output quality depends on how cleanly the source book or document is structured
  • Only benefits agents that support the Agent Skills standard
  • Self-hosted CLI tool with no managed hosting, dashboard, or vendor support

Questions & Answers

Alternatives

LlamaIndex, LangChain, NotebookLM, Cursor

book-to-skill | AI Tools Directory