Personal Documents Now Working

[sirbruce]

Just an FYI, haven't seen it posted here, but the Personal Documents heading for the Kindle 2 is now working. Currently all files emailed to Amazon for conversion will be tagged PSNL and will now show under Personal Documents. Items transferred via USB will still be treated as books.

I've fiddled around with the files in a hex editor and couldn't find an easy way to convert files from PSNL to EBOK or vice-versa, so I'll leave that to someone else.

[susan_cassidy]

Could it be part of the filename? I know 'ebok' is part of the filename from Amazon. 'smpl' or similar is for samples, I vaguely remember.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Just an FYI, haven't seen it posted here, but the Personal Documents heading for the Kindle 2 is now working. Currently all files emailed to Amazon for conversion will be tagged PSNL and will now show under Personal Documents. Items transferred via USB will still be treated as books.

I've fiddled around with the files in a hex editor and couldn't find an easy way to convert files from PSNL to EBOK or vice-versa, so I'll leave that to someone else.

Use mobi2mobi to check the meta data.Maybe it is just an extra EXTH header that contains the information.

[sirbruce]

I can tell you that most filenames of docs downloaded from Amazon are in the following format:

<Book Name>-asin_XXXXXXXXXX-type_YYYY-v_Z.azw

Where XXXXXXXXXX is a 10 digit alphanumeric string, YYYY is a type identifier (EBOK, FEED, PSNL, possibly others), and Z is a varialble-digit number which appears to be a version ID; most books are 0, but FEED (blogs) seems to be an incrementally increasing number. Don't have a magazine sub to tell you what those look like.

Anyway, internally, there's a string for PSNL, EBOK, etc. which is what the Kindle really uses to classify the book. However, just changing the string won't do; there's a flag somewhere that probably has to be changed. I just don't know what is is.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Anyway, internally, there's a string for PSNL, EBOK, etc. which is what the Kindle really uses to classify the book. However, just changing the string won't do; there's a flag somewhere that probably has to be changed. I just don't know what is is.

The format is documented on the wiki. Use some tool like mobi2mobi to look at the data. Then you will for example see if PSNL and EBOK belongs to the same "data slot". If the slot is different it is not enough to change the string.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by tompe

The format is documented on the wiki. Use some tool like mobi2mobi to look at the data. Then you will for example see if PSNL and EBOK belongs to the same "data slot". If the slot is different it is not enough to change the string.

I took a look at the wiki. AZW is not documented much at all; it just points to the MOBI entry. MOBI doesn't mention any of the strings I did and says in the entry that it is not well-formatted. MOBI2MOBI seems to know a lot more about the format, but little of it is documented in the MOBI2MOBI entry. Yes, I could download and install MOBI2MOBI and the GUI but I'm not really looking to investigate this myself at the moment. I'll leave it for someone else to document the (still undocumented) AZW/MOBI format and figure out what program to use or what program to modify so that it can support editing such metadata tags.

[palex481]

See! Thats why the Amazon lady kept saying "Personal Documents" all the time when I called them. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41270

Before you know it, Amazon will start censoring what is transferred over the email conversion. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

[whitearrow]

Kindlejunkie has further info here! She's found the right flags for use on the mobi2mobi gui and is looking for help in figuring out a command line string so that mac users can also use this info.