The latest firmware for Kindle 3, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch and Kindle PaperWhite added the support for the new
AZW3/
mobi8 format.
ePub format is not actually handled by Amazon devices but the latest
mobi version handles many of the ePub features and an ePub converted to mobi8 with calibre looks very similar to the original.
However there's an important missing feature on kindles: hyphenation. Actually there's an hack (by Ixtab) for Kindle Touch an Kindle Paperwhite which adds hyphenation support for the older
mobi format, but it cannot work for
AZW3/
mobi8.
The weird thing is that
hyphens can already be handled by the new kindle format. If you manually insert the
­ HTML entity (
soft hyphen) between the syllables in an
ePub book and convert it to
AZW3 they're correctly rendered on the screeen. And it won't affect indexing and searching. Here is a
post with a sample. Yes, it's definitely not elegant and files will be larger but at the moment it's the only option to have hyphenation on this format (and more in general, on un-hacked e-ink Kindles).
It would then be nice to have a plugin (or to modify an existing one) to add/remove this sort of "hyphenation emulation" to
ePubs before conversion to
mobi8/
azw3.