The Kindle is Getting Support For HTML5

Nate the greatest writes "It looks like Amazon won't be adopting Epub after all. [Thursday] Amazon released some technical details on the new Kindle ebook format, which they are calling Kindle 8. There are a lot of interesting changes to the file, including new formatting and SVG images. The new tags are going to open up a whole lot of new possibilities for making Kindle ebooks."

Re:Good News for Authors

[dgatwood]

KindleGen (at least in the shipping version, v1.2) is great as long as you don't mind 90% of your CSS going away in ways that are utterly mind-blowingly awful looking.

When generating content for Kindle for my novel, I have to produce a whole separate set of HTML source content with dozens of differences between that and proper EPUB (including a fair number of tags that aren't even legal in EPUB, but are the only way to get KindleGen to behave).

The short list is that:

• Right margins don't work.
• Width and min-width CSS don't work (but the HTML width attribute does).
• IIRC, padding doesn't work at all.
• The blockquote tag only indents for a single paragraph unless you close and reopen it.
• CSS class attributes with more than one class don't work. (Only the last one is used, IIRC.)
• Most CSS selectors that contain multiple tags with some symbol in between them are incorrectly treated in such a way that the rule applies to both classes.
• Font styles are completely nonexistent. You can't even do something as basic as specifying that parts of the content should be serif and parts should be sans-serif.

Basically, you should assume that you'll have to rewrite all your content to have exactly one CSS style for each paragraph or other block-level element, selected programmatically based on how you want it to behave. So if you want something to happen only on the first paragraph after a section heading in the appendices, you're going to end up with classes like " class='firstParagraphAfterSectionHeadingInAppendix' " or similar for those paragraphs.

I spent less than a day getting content working in a properly standards-compliant browser (including writing the code to translate it from XML), a couple more hours working around minor layout bugs on Nook, and around a week getting Kindle to look even remotely palatable. That's for somebody who writes parsers as part of his day job. I mean, don't get me wrong, I spent several weeks pounding on LaTeX for PDF output, so the Kindle experience was by no means the most horrible part of the process, but it was way up there.

Put bluntly, KindleGen isn't the answer. At best, it's the first 10% of the answer. The rest, you get to code yourself. That's why pretty much everybody I've ever encountered who has attempted to format an eBook for Kindle has pretty much come out the other side with a whole new vocabulary of swear words. :-D

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

"In the agency model, publishers set the price and designate an agent--in this case the bookseller--who will sell the book and receive the 30% commission. Adopting the model for e-books tends to mean e-book prices will rise, something both publishers and independent retailers applaud. Publishers believe low e-book prices devalue their books and cannibalize hardcover sales. Under the agency model once a price has been set it cannot be changed or discounted by the retailer and independent e-book retailers believe the higher prices of the agency model allow them to compete with big e-book vendors. " (from this article [publishersweekly.com])

At least Amazon was selling ebooks for reasonable prices and encouraging competition in the market. Now we have a racket that is enforced on all sellers. Neither he nor Amazon have been able to dissuade publishers from using DRM.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

Yes, I too think that DRM-free ebooks are a good thing.

If you read technical books, O'Reilly offers DRM-free ebooks from their website in several formats, including PDF, ePUB, and MOBI (Kindle-compatible).

They do this by marking your ebook: "Prepared for [your_email_address], [Your Name]" on the bottom of the pages. I think this is okay since it discourages piracy and marks the book as yours the same as if your wrote your name in the front cover of a paper book.

I hope that other publishers will adopt this practice or something similar.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

You can get Sigil [google.com] - it's a WYSISYG ePub writer. You can either write in the word processor window, or in the raw XHTML. I've not used it to build ePubs from scratch but I have used it to edit and clean them up and it's reasonably nice once you get used to its quirks.

Calibre's OK, but I'd stick to the command-line tools, if I were you. I find the GUI distracting and not really quite suited for the purpose I put it to, whereas the command-line tools are there to edit metadata (though you might want to edit the results by hand to avoid Calibre leaving its fingerprints everywhere) and convert from a multitude of input formats to a multitude of outputs. ePub -> Mobi/AZW is particularly clean since ultimately so far as I know it's swapping one subset of XHTML to another subset of XHTML.

Both are worth a try. You do lose the easy sharing that you're getting with Google Docs, but you can always replace that with something like DropBox.