08-28-2010, 01:32 PM | #1 |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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Did Amazon kill the Topaz format while no one was looking?
I just heard on Twitter that someone's topaz ebooks were now AZW. I checked the 2 I own and both are now AZW.
Could you check your Kindle ebooks? I'm curious to see if this happened to all the titles. |
08-28-2010, 01:37 PM | #2 |
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Isn't the point of Topaz that it can support more complex formatting than Mobi can do? I don't see how a Topaz book could simply be replaced by a Mobi version.
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08-28-2010, 01:38 PM | #3 |
Nameless Being
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I bought the following three days ago:
Ye Will Say I Am No Christian Th-asin_B002LARIUW-type_EBOK-v_0.azw1 Is that Topaz. It seems like it since I cannot change the font in the K3. The book is "Ye Will Say I Am No Christian": The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, And Values. Last edited by jswinden; 08-28-2010 at 01:42 PM. |
08-28-2010, 01:46 PM | #4 |
Mrawr?
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hmm, the most recent books i've bought from amazon have the .prc extension with an .mpb sidefile.
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08-28-2010, 01:51 PM | #5 | |
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Quote:
The Kindle will certainly read Mobi files with a "prc" extension, but that's self-loaded content. |
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08-28-2010, 01:56 PM | #6 |
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B005L789Z0_EBOK.prc is how it looks in the "my kindle content" folder on my PC, with the sidefile to match.
afaik, that's the folder where the purchases drop. |
08-28-2010, 02:03 PM | #7 |
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My understanding is that Topaz was developed as a quick and dirty method for Amazon to make books available when a publisher had no immediate plans to work on an ebook release themselves. Any book I've had in Topaz (all fiction books) had nothing special to the layout that Mobi can't handle.
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08-28-2010, 02:07 PM | #8 |
Wizzard
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What extension you get depends on how you download them.
K4PC/K4Mac seem to have a uniform PRC or AZW, regardless of which format they actually come in (I just checked with a fresh d/l of two known Topaz books from my archives). Downloading from the website gives you AZW/TPZ respectively, and wireless delivery to one's Kindle does AZW/AZW1. There have been a number of books which've apparently come out in Topaz format originally that the publisher has reportedly now switched over to making a Mobi version of. That may be what the OP's correspondent was referring to. |
08-28-2010, 02:11 PM | #9 |
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Topaz is a format to allow book scans to be made partially reflowable. Presumably as soon as a publisher makes a proper ebook version of a title available, it supersedes any existing Topaz version.
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08-28-2010, 02:29 PM | #10 |
reader
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There actually seems to be more new titles coming out in TOPAZ over the past few months. Two examples are Blood of Ambrose by James Enge and Finch by Jeff VanderMeer. Both are 2009 World Fantasy Awards Nominees. Strangely, Finch is available from Sony in the US as an ePub (so an AZW version should be trivial to produce from the ePub).
On the other hand, Rock Paper Tiger by Lisa Brackmann came out in June as a TOPAZ and is now an AZW. |
08-28-2010, 02:47 PM | #11 |
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There is an interesting article from the creator of the Topaz format where he shares some of the reasons that justify its existence:
http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/2010/01/0...evelopment.php "The format has problems and it's arguably roundabout and circuitous for getting a worse result than a more obvious approach, but it has very good reasons to exist. If the books that are in Topaz format weren't in Topaz format, they wouldn't be in any legal ebook format. The point of Topaz was to prove to an old and established industry that ebooks are beneficial, and provide them an easy means to make it happen so that in the long term, everything will be available as a well-formatted ebook to begin with." |
08-28-2010, 03:01 PM | #12 | |
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Quote:
I have two topaz books in my library... I just re-downloaded them to K4PC... they both have the .prc extension... they are both STILL in the topaz format. |
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08-28-2010, 03:12 PM | #13 |
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I have one topaz book and 3 samples that I just reloaded for my K3 -- and they aren't indexing. Everything else indexed overnight, but those files and only those files didn't.
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08-28-2010, 03:32 PM | #14 |
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08-28-2010, 03:38 PM | #15 |
Nameless Being
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Some of the Topaz books wouldn't be so terrible if Amazon could port the contrast adjustment they use for PDFs in the K3 to Topaz books. The few Topaz books I've downloaded have had such light fonts that they are difficult to read even on a Pearl screen.
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