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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform?

That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.

Calibre already generates better Kindle books than Amazon's tool ever did. And it runs cross-platform, including Linux. This is a case where the community support is better than the company.

Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?

Yeah, this decision makes business sense for Amazon. Updating a Linux client is a nice gesture but affects a very small parentage of desktop users.

That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but multibillion corporation cuts it for “business sense”.

It's precisely because the enthusiasts are doing it for free that makes it viable. When a corporation manages Linux software, even if the software is freely available, they're paying for support time -- and if they're developing the software, as in this case, the development time.

exactly! Another way to see it: engineering is the easy/cheap part. Testing, supporting, maintaining and marketing are way more expensive, and those are long-term expenses. The enthusiast usually thinks about the engineering bits, and when he's done with it he's done with it. Enterprise software is not like that - or shouldn't be :)

There are lots of things I do for free that multibillion dollar corporations would consider a cost centre. Amazon also doesn't maintain my garden.

From past experience with desktop/client apps, the number of Linux users was under 1%.

They were a minority, but a very vocal one.

I'm under the impression publishers can send epubs to Amazon and have Amazon do the conversion. Alternatively send them a regular mobi instead of Amazon's spiced up mobi derivative (awz3 or whatever they're at now.)

At least that's how it used to be years ago. My experience here is a few years out of date.

No. You can submit your work as epub, docx, and some more formats. You can then view how the converted version looks on various devices on the amazon website. I used google docs for a short story and the docx version worked the best (epub from google docs had some weird spacing issues).

The software helps as an alternative to having to submit it on amazon website during the various drafts.

What's wrong with that? Aren't most people that aren't tech savvy using Windows or Mac?

I fail to see the connection between "tech-savvy" users and this tool, which is a command line tool. Why would a "non-tech-savvy" person even touch this? Either way, we will always have our ways (calibre's ebook converter [which has a GUI, and is available on the platforms that normal people use], pandoc, whatever).

It seems that Amazon has already made their mind up and made a Kindle Previewer for Windows and Mac OS (No Linux), with a GUI and is more 'accessible' than KindleGen.

In this case, Linux support isn't worth it for them.

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