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Originally Posted by nickredding
Are they EXACTLY the same? I found that Kindlegen inserts data bytes into SOME of the TBS records that don't seem to make sense (and I can't figure out the logic that generates them), but if they are omitted--bingo, the K3 problem.
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As best as I can tell, yes they are. I figured out the purpose of every TBS byte. With the exception of the first two or three, which seems to be some sort of type. The pattern of the types is pretty consistent, so I just use that without fully understanding it. The extra bytes you are talking about (I think), are HTML offsets. These occur in records that have a section transition and are the offset from the start of the record to the start of the new section. Unfortunately, as you discovered, kindlegen doesn't put them in consistently in every such record and I haven't been able to figure out what algorithm it uses. Which is why I suspect that it is related to the HTML markup in the records in question. This is pretty much the only aspect of the TBS that I couldn't figure out. If you run calibre-debug --inspect-mobi on any such file, you'll get the interpretation of the bytes in tbs_indexing.txt
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OK, that's really interesting. I haven't seen that, but it should be noted that Amazon took some stuff OUT of Kindlegen between 1.1 and 1.2 that looks like it was intended to frustrate people using it to generate periodicals (e.g., the masthead processing disappeared). Instapaper is still using 1.1, and it would be interesting to see if 1.1 produces the same defective result as 1.2 on the source you are using.
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Doesn't work with either kindlegen 1.1 or 1.2. You can try it out for yourself, run
ebook-convert somerecipe.recipe .mobi --output-profile kindle --kindlegen
This will use the calibre code to convert the html+css to MOBI markup and then run kindlegen on the result. The resulting periodical seems to have everything it should, but exhibits the kindle 3 problem. You will need to have kindlegen on your path for this to work.
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I too thought it would be a relatively straightforward reverse-engineering job to fix the K3 problem. However, after 150 hours of work I concluded that the folks at Amazon are either really bad software developers or they are trying to make life difficult for people using alternate methods of generating periodicals (that don't involve paying Amazon for subscriptions). My money is on the latter.
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Given the utter bone headedness I see in the MOBI design, I wouldn't be so sure
More details on everything I did are at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/748741