grab-story

name	grab-story
description	Find and fetch story text for Echo from any source — URLs, PDFs, book names, topics, or vague vibes. Saves to backend/db/. Use when asked to "grab", "fetch", "download", "get", or "find" a book, chapter, story, passage, or text. Also use when the user needs demo content, test input, something to paste into Echo, or says things like "find me something good to try", "I need a story", or "get me something visual/immersive".
version	0.2.0
allowed-tools	["Bash","Read","Write","Grep","WebFetch","Agent"]

Grab Story — Fetch text for Echo

Finds and fetches story text from any source and saves it to backend/db/ for use as Echo input. Handles URLs, book names, topics, PDFs, and vague prompts.

What the user might say

• "grab chapter 3 of Dracula" — specific book + chapter
• "get me something from ancient Greek mythology" — topic/vibe
• "fetch this: https://example.com/story.pdf" — direct URL
• "find a vivid horror passage" — mood-based request
• "download the opening of Moby Dick" — specific section
• "get something with rich visuals for a 3D demo" — Echo-optimized request

Strategy: Adapt to the input

If the user gives a direct URL

1. Determine the content type:
   • HTML page: Use WebFetch to get the content, or curl + strip HTML tags
   • PDF: Download with curl, use pdftotext to extract (check which pdftotext first, install with brew install poppler if missing)
   • Plain text: Download directly with curl
2. Extract the requested section (chapter, passage, etc.)
3. Save to backend/db/

If the user gives a book name (with or without chapter)

Search multiple public domain sources in order:

1. Project Gutenberg — largest free ebook library
   • Search: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query={book+name}
   • Plain text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/{id}/{id}-0.txt or https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/{id}/pg{id}.txt
2. Standard Ebooks — beautifully formatted public domain books
   • Browse: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ (search by author/title)
3. Internet Archive — huge collection of texts
   • Search: https://archive.org/search?query={book+name}&mediatype=texts
4. WikiSource — source texts with good structure
5. General web search via WebFetch if needed

If the user gives a topic or vibe

Use your knowledge to suggest 2-3 specific books/passages that would work well for Echo (visually rich, describable physical spaces), then fetch the user's pick. Prioritize:

• Vivid physical descriptions (architecture, landscapes, interiors)
• Strong atmosphere and lighting
• Multiple distinct locations/scenes
• Public domain or freely available

Good Echo sources by genre:

• Gothic: Poe, Stoker, Shelley, Lovecraft
• Adventure: Verne, Stevenson, Doyle
• Fantasy: Tolkien (some public domain), myths, fairy tales
• Historical: Dickens, Hugo, Dumas
• Horror: Lovecraft, M.R. James, Blackwood
• Mythology: Ovid, Homer, Norse Eddas

Extraction

For plain text files

1. Download to /tmp/
2. Find chapter/section boundaries with grep
3. Strip boilerplate headers/footers (Gutenberg *** START/END ***, etc.)
4. Extract the requested section with sed
5. Verify the end of the extracted text — read the last 10 lines and make sure it doesn't include the start of the next chapter, page numbers, or other junk. Trim if needed. This is a common mistake with sed range extraction where the end boundary captures a few lines too many.

For HTML pages

1. Fetch with WebFetch or curl
2. Strip HTML: <script>, <style>, tags, entities
3. Extract the relevant section

For PDFs

1. Download to /tmp/
2. Convert the full PDF with pdftotext input.pdf output.txt (page-range extraction often misses chapter boundaries that don't align to page breaks)
3. Find chapter boundaries in the extracted text with grep, then use sed/head/tail to extract
4. Always verify the tail — read the last 10 lines of the output and trim any next-chapter headings, page numbers, or blank lines that leaked in

Saving

• Save to backend/db/ in the repo
• Naming: {book-slug}-ch{N}.txt or {descriptive-name}.txt
  • great-gatsby-ch3.txt
  • norse-creation-myth.txt
  • fall-of-house-of-usher.txt
• Show the user: file path, line count, and first few lines to confirm

Important notes

• Prefer public domain texts — check copyright status if unsure
• For Echo, prioritize passages with rich spatial/visual descriptions over dialogue-heavy sections
• If the text is very long (>10k chars), warn the user and suggest a shorter section
• Clean up temp files in /tmp after extraction
• If you can't find the exact text, tell the user what you found and ask how to proceed