Calibre was always much better at generating Kindle-compatible books than Kindlegen ever was. We use Calibre in our posix-based build chain at Standard Ebooks.
The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-bar world of ereaders).
Kobo's also are very hackable, It's easy to get a cheap second hand one, pop off the back cover, swap out the sd card with a bigger one with custom user environments and reader software[1] loaded on it and without any nagging to use a particular store. You can sync books/rss feeds/wallabag saved web pages to it over wifi with calibre. Put a bit of tape over the logo and you have a great white label, no distractions device.
Alright then, question time: I've looked into Kobo for my wife, who predominantly reads books in Spanish.
Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter where I am physically located in the world?
If you have a good local library system, they probably have a subscription service to an ebook provider that is not Amazon/kobo and will let you borrow ebooks for free, just like physical books from the library. Mine has a wide selection that includes Spanish language books.
Are you sure? They do obscure the direct download links on the German kobo site (kobobooks.de), apparently preferring people to use their e-readers sync functionality. But last i checked I was able to download the kepub files after some browsing around in the web interface. I can't verify this now as the site isn't loading for some reason
Replying to myself here. it is indeed possible. On the website, go to "My account -> my books" (for me that's https://www.kobo.com/de/en/library) where you see all the covers of your books. Directly underneath the cover are three dots "...". Clicking on them brings up a small menu with a download option.
But now that I think about it, it might also have sth to do with the fact that coincidentally, all the books I bought on Kobo seem to be without DRM (publisher is Tor.com), so maybe that's got sth to do with it as well.
https://www.nubico.es/ is what came with my bq Cervantes, but I can't vouch about whether the DRM is cross compatible -- though I'm sure with Calibre it can probably be stripped.
I would be happy to buy a non Kindle device if someone can explain what the library loan story looks like there. I use a combo of Libby, OverDrive, cloudLibrary, and SimplyE (nuts that 1 need four apps for 1 library system). Afaik there is no good way for me to borrow books unless I stay on Kindle.
I use OverDrive on my Kobo Forma. I have had no problem checking out books and reading them using that method. I have not looked into the other services you listed here.
Several Kobo modules (at least the Aura One, which I have and love) come with Overdrive built in (I think they may have bought Overdrive). You can browse and borrow right from the device although its a little clunky. But you can also browse through your libraries interface and everything you borrow will be downloaded the next time you connect to wifi.
I use a Nook, and I can get ebooks on it from my local library, which is mostly via OverDrive. You do need to use Adobe Digital Editions to get the loaned books.
One nice thing about the Nook is that the private key for encryption is stored in an easily-accessible hidden file, which makes de-DRM'ing your books ridiculously easy if you need to do that.
The problem is the rest of the amazon ecosystems integration is great. If I buy a Kindle eBook I get a discount on the audio-book from Audible and they compliment each-other with good integration. for example the Audiobook picks up where I stopped reading, or the kindle will open where I last listened and I can ask Alexa to play my book when I have to stop reading and do housework.
its not lock in exactly as I can listen to/read my books on other devices android phone/tablet apple iP(one/ad/od) my tv etc... and while there is drm it is trivial to bypass (openaudible calibre), It is more there ecosystem acts as a value added such that while a kindle on its own merits is a inferior system together makes a better option then buying from someone else. this may constitute a classic abuse of horizontally integrated monopoly though.
This is why I am on Kindle as well. I enjoy the "Whispersync" Audible/Kindle integration and multi-device support.
For those that don't know, Whispersync is easily the Kindle's "killer feature". It syncs your location in the book across all devices (I use iPad, Kindle Paperwhite, and iPhone, Sonos, Alexa, etc). So if you read a chapter on your phone, and then go to your Kindle later that night, it will keep you in the right location. But even more impressive is that you can skip in and out of the audible versions at will as well, and stay in sync. So I can literally read a book on my Kindle one night. The next morning I can read a chapter on my iPad. Then I can jump into the car at work and listen via the Audible CarPlay app in my car. Then I can read more on my iPhone via the Kindle iOS app while I wait for a meeting to start, then I can listen to the Audio version on my Alexa in my office, come home and listen to the Audio version on my Sonos speakers while I cook dinner, and then go back to my Kindle as I settle down in bed for the night. Seamlessly staying in sync across all these devices. It is really awesome, and makes the Kindle worth it in my opinion.
The new Kindle Paperwhites also support Audible on them via bluetooth headphones and you can listen while you read along.
I literally just purchased a book about 10 minutes ago and added the audible narration. I don't maintain an audible subscription because I have found that I can often buy books + audible versions bundled together for the same price (and often less) than a month of Audible. So I prefer to just buy them ala-cart with the kindle book bundles. It is a better deal.
I realize that I sound like a fanboy, and I am. I'm a huge fan of the kindle. It isn't perfect, but until another ecosystem can match the audible/kindle whispersync feature with apps on literally every device (including smart speakers, ai devices, etc) then I will stick with Kindle, even if the books are more expensive, because it is just easier.
pretty much where I am at. at this point pretty much the only thing to get me out of their ecosystem at this point would be either a government break up of amazon/a long series foot shooting measures by amazon, fallowed someone else making a low price color e-ink reader before amazon. But color e-readers like that wont be out a reasonable price for 10-20 years based on patents owned by e-Ink expiring around then. (eInk really doesn't seem to want anyone to use their technology for some reason.)
Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox:
- supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR
- no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me
- is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking
I have a Kobo. This is correct -- it won't let you do anything before you connect it to Wifi.
However, there is a trivial hack to get around this where you connect it to your computer via USB and manually edit a sqlite database to put in some blank entries on the registration. There are lots of posts on how to do this online. After you've done this, it works offline just fine.
If you mean this, https://www.amazon.com/b?node=17717476011, the Kobo indeed has many of those features as of now. Supports searching a Dictionary, Wikipedia, Google, and adding notes. There are translations in the Dictionary, but the "Word Wise" feature does not exist, but I can live without that. I can understand some who wouldn't, though.
The linked page doesn't actually say that Linux is no longer supported. You need to go to the Previewer Product page https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765... then scroll down to the System Requirements, where it says "Windows 8.1 or later, Intel Mac OSX 10.13 or later".
I'm not sure how much of a big deal this is in practice. Amazon's KindleGen tool was never open source, and Kindle-specific book formats are proprietary. And, while this is admittedly anecdotal, I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that Linux users tend toward the, hmm, opinionated when it comes to certain things, licensing chief among them.
Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those workflows are still available.
Yeah, you can upload an epub to Amazon's Kindle publishing portal, and it will convert it and provide a download link for the converted version (if you want to double-check it before hitting "Publish" -- recommended).
Oh dang. I used this to publish my first (and only) eBook as the final chain in my Sphinx based workflow. It was fun to publish a book on Amazon. I'm not sure I would have tried it if the Linux tooling hadn't been there.
Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.
I've used both at times but kindlegen sometimes failed to convert books correctly whereas calibre did not, so at least anecdotally calibre seemed better.
For what it's worth, Kindle Previewer 3 runs without issue under Wine (well, at least the CLI). I use it to convert epub files to KFX to add to my Kindle.
Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by email with this service.
Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.
> Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.
That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send documents to the device).
I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet provide. More info on recent changes here: https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-chang...
Kindle can handle PDF (and plain text) natively. If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. Also, it’s the only reasonable choice if your book has math or anything else typographically challenging.
> If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format
That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own personal use, not for distribution.)
You and the other reply are correct about font sizes. I thought it was obvious that, if you are generating different files for different screen sizes, you can also generate large-type versions. This can all be automated. Why bother? Because the usual format for Kindle books looks bad, like webpages. And, as I said, forget about math, etc.
Having two font settings to choose from is a degraded user experience. You're also missing the margin and line spacing settings, as well as font style. Also TTS sucks with PDFs but works excellent with reflowable formats (this one is important to me personally.)
> the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages.
Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided.
> math
This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than offering dozens of PDF variations.
Poor typography is a degraded user experience. If a Kindle is to be an electronic replacement for a paper book, it is nice if it also has decent typesetting, like a real book.
There are tradeoffs. If some things are more important to you, I would hesitate to accuse you of being “misguided”.
EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version would be trivial.
Sorry, that's my bad for using an initialism without clarification.
> EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version would be trivial.
The problem with plain text is you lose the styling and images. A lot of people who use text to speech (TTS) still have some vision or even full vision, and would like to see the pictures or bolded/italic text. If there were a richer format that included those things but worked well with TTS, wouldn't that be worth offering for download? And isn't an epub exactly that sort of format?
Active users of ereader devices predominantly use them to read reflowable formats. If the aesthetics or functionality of the reflowable experience offended those users, they probably wouldn't remain users/owners of such a device for long. I'm sure there are some exceptions.
Offering a PDF, or even many PDFs, is fine. Some people prefer PDFs and their opinion is no less valid the preference for reflowable formats.
In my opinion, a reflowable format should always be offered to those who want it, but certainly not forced on everybody. I think authors like Douglas R. Hofstadter who insist on strict fixed formatting are within their rights to do so, but are misguided. I own a paperback copy of how book; I wish I could also own an epubs copy, but unfortunately that seems impossible due to the imposed preferences of the author.
When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go, the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut for launch.
Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however, those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team (justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file (e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to would need to change.
Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially, their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted several months to implement the feature.
Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references, and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively.
This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now. It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow, but the tide will continue.
¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.
I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad.
This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No, there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences.
Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop, the motivations to fix this here, are mixed.
As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome.
I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable.
Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.
> I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad.
Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?
Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..
No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also intrude adverts into the flow...
> Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..
That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful.
Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store. My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon launched Kindle.
Did you read the rest of my comment? It addressed the matter of substance. Ask yourself what other field of a like nature has led to an outcome of this type. Does a Sony VHS only read Sony produced films? Does a Philips CD player only play Dutch cds? Does an iPhone only play iPhone music? Does chrome refuse to show pages for Microsoft?
The Kindle imposes a strong wall that (pdf aside) says only Kindle managed epub is routinely available and then imposes constraints on how content is added 'for a better reader experience'
If you have your copy of kindlegen, it will continue to work - it is a 32-bit statically linked binary, so as long as your kernel supports 32-bit processes and 32-bit ELF files, you are good to go.
That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it didn't run on Catalina at all.
> At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
That's what epubs are, plain old zip files with some xhtml, CSS, etc. You can unzip them using standard utilities. Mobi files aren't zips, but the premise is roughly the same and conversion between the two is usually seamless.
The only custom ROM I know about that supports Kindle devices is KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader). I don't like its interface one bit, but feature-wise it gets the job done just fine.
There's also Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato) for Kobo devices, though KOReader works there as well. In my experience jailbreaking a Kobo device is much less painful.
I've done it before on a really old Kindle... KOReader isn't precisely an alternate firmware. It's just a piece of software you run on the Kindle in place of the default, and it does have its advantages, at least on my old Kindle: for example, I could enable Night Mode and read ePubs. It also supported connecting to Calibre wirelessly which was also convenient-ish (Calibre still eats up MIME types and I was very happy on the day I could finally uninstall it, and KOReader doesn't support using USB to transfer without first stopping KOReader). Other than that, maybe it's because my Kindle was aging, but the battery life seemed to worsen dramatically after jailbreaking, and I had to downgrade to an older firwmare in order to jailbreak it.
The Kindle was getting old and I bought a Kobo anyway (in part because I'm tired of contributing to Amazon's empire, and further propelled by the fact that it supports Adobe DRM'ed ePubs [and well, while I don't like DRM, it's nice to be able to have the option of using my local library's ebooks]). I'd think you're correct about the Kobo's jailbreaking (haven't tried it myself, but I do intend on doing it in the future, and perhaps developing software for it), but I know already it's much, much easier to customize, thanks to the wonderful hidden folder with the Kobo eReader.conf file, where you can, for example, set the power button to screenshot (which disables the power button, but I have an aftermarket magnetic sleep cover, so this isn't an issue).
You can stick koreader on them. Of course you'll have to go through the trouble of de-DRMing your content, but it's not that hard using Calibre. At that point you should just buy a Kobo forma, which is much nicer hardware.
I just recently bought a Kindle, and this has not been my experience. For whatever reason, perhaps something I am doing wrong, it is not detected as a hard drive by my system.
Odd. I've never had this issue -- plug it in and the mass storage shows up. My platform is Linux, but this shouldn't make a difference.
What I have seen, however, are plenty of micro USB cables which do not have the data lines connected. They are intended to be used for charging only and have +5V and Ground wires only.
I can't say for you, but there are plenty of other options. PocketBook (which recently released a color e-ink ereader), Kobo, Onyx (which I have heard negative things about regarding their unwillingness to comply with the GPL for their Linux kernel), the ReMarkable (which I have heard is incredibly hackable), and the Nook. There's probably even more I'm forgetting, but Kindles are definitely not the only option.
I use some product produced domestically. It has all the features I need, and none of the spyware or adware. It was also cheap. I am really happy with this product.
[crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to switch to calibre based tooling.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-bar world of ereaders).