read-book

read-book is a skill for Claude Code from coreyhaines31/makerskills. It costs 192 tokens per session (2,297 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for turning books and long documents into structured notes. It accepts formats such as PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Markdown, text, pasted content, and some public-domain URLs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for chapter summaries, key concepts, quotes with context, action items, frameworks, whole-book summaries, or study question cards.
Why use it?
It saves you from reading a long source without an organized record of its main ideas, useful quotes, and practical steps.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the makerskills plugin — 21 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it for chapter summaries, key concepts, quotes with context, action items, frameworks, whole-book summaries, or study question cards.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add coreyhaines31/makerskills --skill read-book
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/coreyhaines31/makerskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install makerskills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for read-book

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for read-book

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 192 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,297 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00192 $0.02297
Opus 5 $0.00096 $0.01149
Sonnet 5 $0.00038 $0.00459
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00230

Measured 9d ago against content hash 08f64c723264, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

read-book scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/read-book/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/read-book — Extract structured notes from books and long PDFs

Sibling to watch-video. Same content-consumption pattern: ingest → chunk → extract → optionally capture to second-brain.

Step 1 — Parse input

Accept:

  • PDF: file path (Claude reads PDFs natively in chunks via Read pages:"X-Y")
  • EPUB / MOBI: file path (needs pandoc or ebook-convert to extract — see references/sources.md)
  • Markdown / .txt: file path (read directly)
  • Pasted text: just use what was pasted
  • URL to public-domain text: WebFetch (Project Gutenberg, archive.org, etc.)

Detect type from file extension. If ambiguous, ask.

Step 2 — Parse mode

Invocation Mode What you get
/read-book <input> notes (default) Chapter-by-chapter: TL;DR + key concepts + quotes + action items + frameworks
/read-book <input> summary summary Whole-book TL;DR (1 paragraph) + 3–5 key takeaways + who-it's-for
/read-book <input> quotes quotes Pull-quote highlights only, with chapter context and page refs
/read-book <input> study study Notes mode + 10–20 spaced-repetition Q&A cards

If the book is long (>200 pages) and mode is unspecified, default to notes but warn it'll take many tool calls.

Step 3 — Get the text + chunk

See references/sources.md for per-source ingestion. Output of this step: text content + a chunking plan.

Chunking strategy (hybrid, in priority order):

  1. By chapter if a TOC exists (PDF with bookmarks, EPUB/MOBI converted via pandoc preserves chapter headers)

    • Use pdfinfo <pdf> | grep "Pages" for PDFs
    • Use pdftotext -layout <pdf> | grep -i "^chapter\|^part" for chapter detection, or read TOC from page 1–5
    • EPUB: after pandoc <epub> -o tmp.md, chunks are between # Chapter X headers
  2. By page count for PDFs without TOC: 50 pages per chunk

  3. By character count for text/markdown: 30,000 chars per chunk (~7,500 words)

Save the chunking plan as ~/Documents/books/<author>-<title-slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>/chunks.json:

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 174 lines · 192 tokens per session scan A 08f64c723264

Subscribe to this mod's changes

read-book is a skill published in the GitHub repository coreyhaines31/makerskills (795 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 192 tokens to every session and 2,297 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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