If you are faced with any sort of text formatting conversion problem, you should probably start with pandoc to solve it.

Suppose you have a portion of a website that you would like to turn into an ebook.

1. Use wget -nc -nd -v -r -l1 $URL to retrieve it. -r sets up recursion, and -l1 limits it to one level deep. You might need more than that.

2. Use a for loop and pandoc -f html -t markdown $infile -o $infile.txt to strip out CSS, JavaScript and other crap.

3. Assemble your ebook with pandoc $file1 $file2 $file3... -t epub -o $ebook.epub

Et voila.

There are lots of other options, including the ability to add your own CSS, table of contents, cover image… It’s really quite nice.