Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I'm extremely confused about this. I have an older Kindle Paperwhite (PW 3/ 7th gen I think?) and when I used the 'email sent' feature I got that mail about dropping mobi support in favor of epub, but when sending an actual epub I got an error for sending a wrong file, ostensibly because the Kindle only supports mobi.

Are they going to ship a software update? Would be a shame if that service doesn't work any more in the future.

View on HN

I had this happen as well and ran the epub through Calibre, converting epub to epub. That actually fixed it and the Kindle accepted the new file.

I never investigated this deeper but I have similar issue on my Nook Glowlight. Despite it supporting ePUB files some of them just throw an error on the devices. Converting them ePUB to ePUB solves the problem.

I've learned recently at my new job that ePubs are just a giant zip file of html, css, etc. Sometimes you need to rezip them if they are not working quite right and I imagine that is what converting them from ePub to ePub is doing.

I converted a PDF to EPUB (v2) through Calibre, and Send to Kindle would not accept it.

Probably because the EPUB file has some problem. Amazon is very strict about EPUB validity.

> Amazon is very strict about EPUB validity.

They're also bad at converting perfectly valid epubs to their own format.

EPUB3, yes. I don't think I have seen any EPUB2 having problem (except if it's missing encoding declaration)

How are you getting them onto your Kindle? Send to Kindle using EPUB does not work at all for me.

Amazon provides a tool that will convert epubs to kindle documents. (Poorly.)

https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Previewer/b?ie=UTF8&node=21381...

They do this because the normal flow involved in publishing a kindle book is that you write an epub and submit it to Amazon.

Not in my experience. Amazon will accept ePubs that Apple Books rejects because of validation errors.

Example: https://twitter.com/leanmediaorg/status/1547292135963168775

Reply on news.ycombinator.com