Amazon Kindle E-Readers Will Now Make It Easier to Load EBooks You Didn't Buy From Amazon (gizmodo.com) 23
In a potential blow to all the apps and websites that have popped up alongside the Amazon Kindle to streamline the process of converting EPUB ebook files to the e-reader's propriety file format, starting in "late 2022," the Kindle Personal Documents Service will finally support EPUB files, expanding where users can source their content. From a report: The Amazon Kindle's original AZW ebook file format was based on the MOBI format created for an e-reader app called Mobipocket, which was first released back in 2000 for a wide variety of PDAs and older mobile devices. Over the years it has evolved into the KF8/AZW3 format, and now the KFX format, which are all proprietary to the Kindle. For those who solely rely on Kindle e-readers and apps and only buy ebooks from Amazon, a proprietary file format isn't an issue, particularly when Amazon offers one of the largest selections of ebooks currently available, and a streamlined way to get the files onto its devices. But there are countless e-readers available on the market that offer better features than the Kindle does, including color E Ink screens, and all of them instead support the EPUB ebook file format (among others), which is the most popular format in the world. It's also a format that Amazon, to date, has refused to support. This has typically meant that someone looking to buy an ebook reader has had to either fully commit to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, or choose one of the many alternatives and stick with their choice, because ebook files they'd purchased or downloaded weren't cross-compatible.
That conclusion. (Score:5, Insightful)
This has typically meant that someone looking to buy an ebook reader has had to either fully commit to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, or choose one of the many alternatives and stick with their choice, because ebook files they'd purchased or downloaded weren't cross-compatible.
Or you could, you know, use amzaon tools, or calibre, to convert from epub to mobi. Still, happy to have epubs in my kindle.
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It's obvious you haven't converted between e-reader formats...
They, simply put, suck. They are awful.
Conversions are not just transcoding, but fine-tuning, thing that no tool Amazon, Calibre, etc. do ever.
Re:That conclusion. (Score:4, Interesting)
But try to convert a PDF file into one of those formats, and all bets are off.
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Re:That conclusion. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had no issues with using Calibre to convert epub to mobi - and I run pretty much all my ebook purchases through Calibre to strip the DRM, so I can back the files up.
I will note that Amazon has made me jump through more hoops to get a copy of Kindle books that the DRM-stripping tools can handle, which is annoying.
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It's worthwhile noting that "beginning in late 2022, you'll no longer be able to send MOBI (.AZW, .MOBI) files to your library using Send to Kindle.":
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help... [amazon.com]
I'm assuming both changes will applied in the same update, although I can't see how the two formats would be related.
While this will make sending from Calibre a bit easier, I don't believe Amazon is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'll be even happier if the EPUB Send to Kindle books support Word Runner (speed re
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For publishers, Amazon already requires EPUB for all new eBooks. You can't submit MOBI any longer for anything except a fixed-format file. [amazon.com]
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While this will make sending from Calibre a bit easier, I don't believe Amazon is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
Given that the full layout of almost all books can be represented in very simple HTML, I imagine the "latest features" Amazon crows about on that are mostly about DRM (meaning features for Amazon's benefit, not for the end user). Amazon's mobi-based DRM is pretty trivial to crack.
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While it probably doesn't make a huge difference given the sizes we're talking about, I have noticed that ePub files tend to be quite a bit smaller than their MOBI counterparts. Not sure why, but an ePub might be 1MB while the MOBI is like 3MB. While part of me realizes that even on models with 4GB of internal storage this is a pretty trivial amount, but another part of me wants to make the most efficient use of space as possible and knowing that one version of the file is quite a bit larger is triggering m
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The size difference is probably because the ePub book is a zipped file containing HTML and CSS stylesheets. Between the repetitive HTML tags and standard English text, there is a huge amount of compression -- about 65% on the sample ePub I opened in 7zip.
I also opened a .mobi file in notepad, and while there is some human readable text, there wasn't that much that I could recognize. When I tried to zip it, I only got about 3% compression.
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Or just get Calibre (Score:4, Informative)
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This. I don't even think you need to batch convert. Just drag and drop as you go.
This seems.... confusing. (Score:2)
I'm not sure what the benefit here is, or why Amazon has refused to support epub in the past.
As far as "books you purchased," if that means B&N or any other epub store selling commercial books from major publishers, you still won't be able to convert them, because DRM.
If you purchased these books from a site that doesn't do DRM, in my experience, they also generally don't do just epub and they allow you to download more than one edition. And if they did limit you to a single epub download, non-DRM epub
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Apparently it's the Send to Kindle applications that will be getting this functionality. According to Amazon's help page (https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G5WYD9SAF7PGXRNA), the Kindle Personal Documents Service (Send to Kindle email) already accepts EPUBs.
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I'm not sure what the benefit here is, or why Amazon has refused to support epub in the past.
When the Kindle came out, there wasn't a widely-accepted standard for ebooks, mainly because there was hardly any legal market for them. The first open (free to implement) version of ePub that supported DRM was approved in 2007, the same year that the first Kindle came out. Before that, there was an open version that didn't support DRM and a paid-for version that did support it. The format that Amazon chose was created by a company that Amazon bought in 2005, so they wouldn't have to pay licensing for it. T
Too little too late (Score:2)
A lot easier to install KOReader on that to get an actual good reading experience.
I will not by an e-book platform from Amazon (Score:2)
Never, not after they removed content [slate.com] that was already on kindle readers. I have a Kobo Libra and it's nice and it doesn't remove my books without my doing so.
Next step (Score:2)
Allowing us to just load unencrypted ePub files directly.
"No big deal"? (Score:2)
And those of us that say that the legal decisions were bought and paid for, and still believe "buy" means "buy", not "rent for one payment, and read until they get tired of it and shut it down for 'not enough people reading it', or 'what, that formats 40 years old, you didn't need to read it anyway'", and want to BACK IT UP TO DISK....