PDS now supports KF8!

[tomsem]

(first reported on 'Mobi' forum here) Amazon has quietly and relatively recently updated Personal Documents Service to support KF8 format. No more side-loading necessary! I'm sure I checked this less than a month ago and it was not in place then.

I had been keeping a bunch of my third party kf8 books in Dropbox/Google Drive but now I can have them more conveniently accessible.

There is, however, a 50MB limit. I have a few books that exceed that.

[Kolenka]

Does it handle covers with KF8? I was able to trick it when the PW came out, but no covers worked.

EDIT: I've been playing with this again, and I'm still getting the same behavior I got months ago when the paperwhite was released:

- AZW3 is still being rejected.
- A MOBI with both may only pass along the MOBI piece, or make the KF8 piece available. Flip a coin. My copy of Blue Mars only passed through the MOBI part of the file, and it stripped out the KF8 part.
- When KF8 isn't stripped, covers don't work on the paperwhite.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

Does it handle covers with KF8? I was able to trick it when the PW came out, but no covers worked.

EDIT: I've been playing with this again, and I'm still getting the same behavior I got months ago when the paperwhite was released:

- AZW3 is still being rejected.
- A MOBI with both may only pass along the MOBI piece, or make the KF8 piece available. Flip a coin. My copy of Blue Mars only passed through the MOBI part of the file, and it stripped out the KF8 part.
- When KF8 isn't stripped, covers don't work on the paperwhite.

I would just use .mobi, not .azw3. That covers everything.

I have been getting both mobi and kf8 from PDS. I check by downloading to Kindle for iOS to verify drop caps and other text formatting degrades (every other kindle I have supports reflowable kf8, and that is what gets sent. Well. I have a K1 but I'm outside of wireless coverage so I cannot check that now).

Cover thumbnails are showing up fine for me (Kindle Touch, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite, K4iOS).

There are some encoding issues with the Author/Title, however (apostrophes, '(C)', '(R)' etc. what used to be called 'hi order' ASCII). Or maybe that is a Sent To Kindle bug. But I've seen similar issues with books from Kindle Store as well.

It would be nice if you could download stuff from PDS with a computer browser. The desktop apps and cloud reader don't support PDS, so there's no way to even side-load to the desktop app unless you have it stored somewhere else. And for times when there's no wireless available and you have to side-load.

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I have been getting both mobi and kf8 from PDS. I check by downloading to Kindle for iOS to verify drop caps and other text formatting degrades (every other kindle I have supports reflowable kf8, and that is what gets sent. Well. I have a K1 but I'm outside of wireless coverage so I cannot check that now).

The problem I've been having is that a sideloaded version doesn't match the downloaded one. Specifically, I get MOBI-style linespacing, not KF8/ePub-style linespacing. That's the most obvious way I can tell the difference. I don't have a ton of stuff that has formatting the only works in KF8 to test that way.

Sometimes, I will get the KF8-style formatting when downloading to the Paperwhite. But it varies from book to book, and how it is converted (I use Calibre for everything). But when it does come through as KF8, the cover doesn't work.

This makes me ask what is probably a fairly important question: How are you doing the conversion?

EDIT: I've just tried Kindlegen as well on an ePub where I got MOBI when using Calibre for the MOBI+KF8 conversion. I got the KF8 output, but no cover.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

The problem I've been having is that a sideloaded version doesn't match the downloaded one. Specifically, I get MOBI-style linespacing, not KF8/ePub-style linespacing. That's the most obvious way I can tell the difference. I don't have a ton of stuff that has formatting the only works in KF8 to test that way.

Sometimes, I will get the KF8-style formatting when downloading to the Paperwhite. But it varies from book to book, and how it is converted (I use Calibre for everything). But when it does come through as KF8, the cover doesn't work.

This makes me ask what is probably a fairly important question: How are you doing the conversion?

EDIT: I've just tried Kindlegen as well on an ePub where I got MOBI when using Calibre for the MOBI+KF8 conversion. I got the KF8 output, but no cover.

I have been using calibre for almost nothing of late, and have never used it to generate kf8. To the extent that I convert ePub files, I just use kindlegen/kindle previewer.

I purchased the books direct from the publisher (e.g. O'Reilly), and they are obviously the output of kindlegen since they are huge (mobi+kf8+source archive). I just stored them in DropBox (O'Reilly syncs to that) and downloaded to my Kindle from there. For me that was far more convenient and predictable than using calibre to manage everything.