Anyone using Kindlegen?

[simonp]

I just got my Kindle 2 for Christmas, and am trying to convert ebooks into mobi format on my Linux machine. My understanding is that Kindlegen turns html into mobi.

If this is true, is there any information on what tags in html are translated into equivalent tags in mobi?

Most importantly I am interested in tags for name and title (information the Kindle seems to use when creating the Home library). What tags in html would be translated into name and title for the mobi?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by simonp

I just got my Kindle 2 for Christmas, and am trying to convert ebooks into mobi format on my Linux machine. My understanding is that Kindlegen turns html into mobi.

If this is true, is there any information on what tags in html are translated into equivalent tags in mobi?

Most importantly I am interested in tags for name and title (information the Kindle seems to use when creating the Home library). What tags in html would be translated into name and title for the mobi?

The Mobipocket site has details in it's help/FAQ section for Mobigen/Mobipocket Creator on what tags it supports. That's always a good place to start. Also, the Kindlegen zipfile has a sample ebook to study.

Derek

[simonp]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

The Mobipocket site has details in it's help/FAQ section for Mobigen/Mobipocket Creator on what tags it supports. That's always a good place to start. Also, the Kindlegen zipfile has a sample ebook to study.

Derek

Thanks for the pointer. I took a quick look through the material in the sample directory, and it looks like the author/title information is stored in a .ncx file.

I will take a look on the Mobipocket site and see how it all fits together.

[chorpler]

I think Author/title information is usually stored in an OPF file. The Table of Contents is in the NCX file (but if you have one in your HTML or other input file, you can just put in a pointer to it in the OPF file's guide section and get to it from there quite easily.

I used to use mobigen and kindlegen, but now that I've got Calibre working to add the Navigation links properly, I just use that -- it lets you store larger images than mobigen/kindlegen will allow, for one thing, and has many more options.

[amberdel]

Do you guys think they will ever include a built in format converter with reading devices in the future? Would definitely simplify things for different OS users.

[zdavatz]

Does anybody have performance comparisons between kindlegen and Calibre? We are running an ebook with kindlegen. The Book has about 3000 pages and kindlegen takes forever. Would Calibre be faster?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by zdavatz

Does anybody have performance comparisons between kindlegen and Calibre? We are running an ebook with kindlegen. The Book has about 3000 pages and kindlegen takes forever. Would Calibre be faster?

Quite possibly, but it'll produce a much bigger book.

[ATimson]

Originally Posted by amberdel

Do you guys think they will ever include a built in format converter with reading devices in the future? Would definitely simplify things for different OS users.

No ebook device will ever support the same variety of input formats as a PC can. As long as the device uses a reasonably-well-documented format (like ePub - though MobiPocket has been fairly well reverse-engineered, and conversion tools like Calibre are available on all three major platforms, so it's at least workable), you'll be better off doing the conversions on the host PC.

[rogerx]

Calibre requires X or graphical frontend, even for it's command line tools such as ebook-convert!

Kindlegen will have no problems working in command line only environments. (ie. server environments)

Calibre, as of 09/2011, produces better viewer (formatted) output vs. kindlegen for complex HTML files using <TABLE> tags. If you're only converting simple HTML pages (ie. without <TABLE> tags such as using man2html), then formating these simple HTML pages to .mobi with kindlegen will be just fine and, if not, identical to Calibre.

See AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf for specifics on supported tags and formating of .mobi books.
(http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/Am...Guidelines.pdf)
(This is posted for historical purposes and those searching.)

[DanBenton]

Hi

The title's definitely in the OPF (it's also in the NCX but only so that ereaders with separate TOC pages can show the title). So title and author are 'dc:title' and 'dc:creator' in the 'metadata' section of the OPF.
Does that help?

www.craig-thrillers.com

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by DanBenton

Hi

The title's definitely in the OPF (it's also in the NCX but only so that ereaders with separate TOC pages can show the title). So title and author are 'dc:title' and 'dc:creator' in the 'metadata' section of the OPF.
Does that help?

www.craig-thrillers.com

what about the <title></title> tag in the <head> of the html?

[DanBenton]

To the best of my knowledge, that isn't used anywhere in an epub, it's just a requirement of (x)html structure.

www.craig-thrillers.com