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Comment by coconut08 | Hacker News Reader

one benefit is that it can allow you to read epubs which is the universal standard for books. the fact that they don't support epubs natively is like having a music player that doesn't support mp3's. the only reason they do it is for the sake of being anti-consumer and anti-competitive.

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Calibre automatically converts everything though. I'm sure there are some edge cases where the conversion isn't perfect, but how are you managing your Kindle where you'd care that the original file is an epub?

i shouldn't be required to convert my books to a proprietary format in order to read them. i also have some epubs that have issues when being converted to mobi or azw3. issues as in they can't be read on the kindle after being converted even though they are read just fine in calibre. if they would just support epub then this wouldn't be an issue.

They are adding epub support this year https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/the-amazon-kindle-will-s...

the article you linked to literally says that's not the case. the way it works is that you upload your epubs to amazon and then they convert them from epub to azw3 for you and then allows you to download them to your device. not only is this a rube goldberg machine that doesn't support epub, it's been unofficially possible for years already by changing the extension from epub to png to trick it into thinking it isn't an epub when it is.

One important caveat in the article:

> Update: It looks like Amazon is converting the uploaded EPUB to KF8 (AZW3). So, it looks like they might not support EPUB natively.

It's a mass storage device. You should be able to plug it in and copy files as normal.

The problem is that many PDF's are simply a bunch of scanned images. And these can't be readily converted to any text based format.

The exception is to put the PDF through an OCR process, but this destroys the formatting and can't deal with images. The whole point of my scanning these old books was to keep the historical information.

I have hundreds of old books I have scanned and converted to PDF, but I cant read these on a Kindle.

what did you use to scan them? did you have to remove the binding?

I have various book scanners. eg a Plustek Optibook 3600 which has done an incredible amount of work.

Plus I've built a dual camera book scanner similar to https://www.diybookscanner.org/

And where necessary I have access to commercial high-speed duplex scanners which do require that the spine be cut. OK for old magazines, etc.

This sounds great, but still much more effort that dragging+dropping into an online epub->mobi converter and using the nice "email yourself a file" feature they support.

Also, epub support is coming and mobi is being deprecated https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/the-amazon-kindle-will-s...

At the end of that article:

> Update: It looks like Amazon is converting the uploaded EPUB to KF8 (AZW3). So, it looks like they might not support EPUB natively.

So I'm not holding my breath. Which is not to say Amazon couldn't add native EPUB support. KF8/AZW3[1] (Amazon's proprietary ebook format) is basically EPUB in a MOBI shell. But they're moving away from KF8 to KFX[2] for books purchased from the Amazon store.

[1] https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KF8 [2] https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KFX

> Which is not to say Amazon couldn't add native EPUB support.

They've had it in the past; I know there have been Kindle models that included a web browser. Is that gone?

They still have a web browser but a web browser is not the same as EPUB support. No Kindle has ever supported epub natively.

> but a web browser is not the same as EPUB support

But a web browser is the same as epub support. If you have a web browser, you have epub support, because rendering HTML is all there is to supporting epub. An epub is nothing but a set of HTML documents.

No it isn't. There's more to Epub than HTML and web browsers don't know by default how deal with the files or handle things like pagination or the table of contents. Mobi is also based on HTML too. Doesn't mean every web browser supports mobi either.

> and web browsers don't know by default how deal with the files or handle things like pagination or the table of contents.

So? Safari and Chrome don't know by default how to handle pagination of documents. (Actually, they do; they handle it by scrolling.) But any browser that exists on a Kindle does. If you can use it to read a web page, you can also use it to read an epub.

I had to load a Firefox extension[0] to read ePub. I don’t think it can read them without it.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/

Sure; the book is a website, not a webpage. The harness has to do three things:

1. Unzip the file.

2. Display the content root.

3. Handle the implicit transition from one chapter to the next.

All of the work involved here is in step 2, writing the web renderer.

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