Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
amazon.com
amazon.com
The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-bar world of ereaders).
Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter where I am physically located in the world?
its not lock in exactly as I can listen to/read my books on other devices android phone/tablet apple iP(one/ad/od) my tv etc... and while there is drm it is trivial to bypass (openaudible calibre), It is more there ecosystem acts as a value added such that while a kindle on its own merits is a inferior system together makes a better option then buying from someone else. this may constitute a classic abuse of horizontally integrated monopoly though.
For those that don't know, Whispersync is easily the Kindle's "killer feature". It syncs your location in the book across all devices (I use iPad, Kindle Paperwhite, and iPhone, Sonos, Alexa, etc). So if you read a chapter on your phone, and then go to your Kindle later that night, it will keep you in the right location. But even more impressive is that you can skip in and out of the audible versions at will as well, and stay in sync. So I can literally read a book on my Kindle one night. The next morning I can read a chapter on my iPad. Then I can jump into the car at work and listen via the Audible CarPlay app in my car. Then I can read more on my iPhone via the Kindle iOS app while I wait for a meeting to start, then I can listen to the Audio version on my Alexa in my office, come home and listen to the Audio version on my Sonos speakers while I cook dinner, and then go back to my Kindle as I settle down in bed for the night. Seamlessly staying in sync across all these devices. It is really awesome, and makes the Kindle worth it in my opinion.
The new Kindle Paperwhites also support Audible on them via bluetooth headphones and you can listen while you read along.
I literally just purchased a book about 10 minutes ago and added the audible narration. I don't maintain an audible subscription because I have found that I can often buy books + audible versions bundled together for the same price (and often less) than a month of Audible. So I prefer to just buy them ala-cart with the kindle book bundles. It is a better deal.
I realize that I sound like a fanboy, and I am. I'm a huge fan of the kindle. It isn't perfect, but until another ecosystem can match the audible/kindle whispersync feature with apps on literally every device (including smart speakers, ai devices, etc) then I will stick with Kindle, even if the books are more expensive, because it is just easier.
(now that I check I can see that Amazon don't seem to allow it outside the USA: https://librariesireland.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/art...)
One nice thing about the Nook is that the private key for encryption is stored in an easily-accessible hidden file, which makes de-DRM'ing your books ridiculously easy if you need to do that.
I recommend kepubify[1] as a dead-simple[2] converter.
[1]: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/
[2]: If you’re minimally comfortable with the command-line.
- supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR
- no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me
- is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking
- could it be sold? Possibly: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten...
- is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes with their support
- does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could find books on it and buy
- are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is a price match (I used it, it works)
- are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked at are listed on the store, newest version
- is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable
One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.
I'm looking for a new ereader and I don't want to have to register/sign in with anything to use it.
However, there is a trivial hack to get around this where you connect it to your computer via USB and manually edit a sqlite database to put in some blank entries on the registration. There are lots of posts on how to do this online. After you've done this, it works offline just fine.
Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those workflows are still available.
The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.
Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle
Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by email with this service.
Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.
That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send documents to the device).
I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet provide. More info on recent changes here: https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-chang...
[[CITATION NEEDED]]
PDFs still don't reflow when changing the text size.
That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own personal use, not for distribution.)
> the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages.
Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided.
> math
This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than offering dozens of PDF variations.
Poor typography is a degraded user experience. If a Kindle is to be an electronic replacement for a paper book, it is nice if it also has decent typesetting, like a real book.
There are tradeoffs. If some things are more important to you, I would hesitate to accuse you of being “misguided”.
EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version would be trivial.
> EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version would be trivial.
The problem with plain text is you lose the styling and images. A lot of people who use text to speech (TTS) still have some vision or even full vision, and would like to see the pictures or bolded/italic text. If there were a richer format that included those things but worked well with TTS, wouldn't that be worth offering for download? And isn't an epub exactly that sort of format?
Active users of ereader devices predominantly use them to read reflowable formats. If the aesthetics or functionality of the reflowable experience offended those users, they probably wouldn't remain users/owners of such a device for long. I'm sure there are some exceptions.
Offering a PDF, or even many PDFs, is fine. Some people prefer PDFs and their opinion is no less valid the preference for reflowable formats.
In my opinion, a reflowable format should always be offered to those who want it, but certainly not forced on everybody. I think authors like Douglas R. Hofstadter who insist on strict fixed formatting are within their rights to do so, but are misguided. I own a paperback copy of how book; I wish I could also own an epubs copy, but unfortunately that seems impossible due to the imposed preferences of the author.
When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go, the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut for launch.
Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however, those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team (justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file (e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to would need to change.
Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially, their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted several months to implement the feature.
Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references, and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively.
This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now. It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow, but the tide will continue.
¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.
This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No, there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences.
Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop, the motivations to fix this here, are mixed.
As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome.
I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable.
Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.
Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?
No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also intrude adverts into the flow...
That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful.
Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store. My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon launched Kindle.
The Kindle imposes a strong wall that (pdf aside) says only Kindle managed epub is routinely available and then imposes constraints on how content is added 'for a better reader experience'
At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
That's what epubs are, plain old zip files with some xhtml, CSS, etc. You can unzip them using standard utilities. Mobi files aren't zips, but the premise is roughly the same and conversion between the two is usually seamless.
You have to make sure that the mimetype file is the very first file in the zip, and that the mimetype file is uncompressed.
Otherwise the epub will fail validation and will not work on many readers.
So yeah, you can unzip them with any standard zip utility, but zipping them back up requires some care.
That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it didn't run on Catalina at all.
I can probably still figure something out with another machine and Windows. Thanks for the tip though.
I wish people would develop cleaner FB3 (Fiction Book) rather than messy and overcomplicated ePub.
The only custom ROM I know about that supports Kindle devices is KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader). I don't like its interface one bit, but feature-wise it gets the job done just fine.
There's also Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato) for Kobo devices, though KOReader works there as well. In my experience jailbreaking a Kobo device is much less painful.
The Kindle was getting old and I bought a Kobo anyway (in part because I'm tired of contributing to Amazon's empire, and further propelled by the fact that it supports Adobe DRM'ed ePubs [and well, while I don't like DRM, it's nice to be able to have the option of using my local library's ebooks]). I'd think you're correct about the Kobo's jailbreaking (haven't tried it myself, but I do intend on doing it in the future, and perhaps developing software for it), but I know already it's much, much easier to customize, thanks to the wonderful hidden folder with the Kobo eReader.conf file, where you can, for example, set the power button to screenshot (which disables the power button, but I have an aftermarket magnetic sleep cover, so this isn't an issue).
Edit: I see a neighbour and I had the same idea
What I have seen, however, are plenty of micro USB cables which do not have the data lines connected. They are intended to be used for charging only and have +5V and Ground wires only.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...
That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
They were a minority, but a very vocal one.
At least that's how it used to be years ago. My experience here is a few years out of date.
In this case, Linux support isn't worth it for them.
The software helps as an alternative to having to submit it on amazon website during the various drafts.
Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.
Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).
No, and they never did.