Quote:
Originally Posted by johnnyb
@tomsem: yep, in fact every file type other than PDF (if not converted) is converted into AZW.. nevertheless, some mobi's (not all of them) were not registered as "in the cloud" properly (and haven't after deleting and resending). They were downloadable but not removed from the "Archived Items" for reasons unknown to me.
@Blossom: What I do not like about the Calibre conversion is that it is so far from the standard (admitted my kovid and staff, there are threads about it) that indexing does not function properly or the indexes are somehow messed up on the Kindle so that with many dictionaries on the Kindle (I have a big selection of Oxford mobi dicts that a bought prior to Kindle, nice reference material) which themselves are indexed somehow, dictionary lookups with Calibre mobis are considerably slower for me (sometimes up to five seconds) than with mobs created with Kindle Previewer (albeit the latter being much bigger in file size) or books purchased from Amazon.
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Kovid answered some of my questions about this and didn't seem to think anything calibre is doing would interfere. But hopefully he or some of the other developers will be poking around to make sure.
If you don't like what calibre (or want to see what it does), turn on debug mode and look at the intermediate HTML files that will be left around. Then you can edit and build mobi from those.
In any case, no automatic conversion should be considered 'commercial grade', though evidently a lot of big publishers just have their epub files run through kindlegen. The most obvious artifact of this is where chapter navigation only hits the top level, e.g. 'Part 1, Part 2, etc.' rather than all the chapters in between.
You might also want to look for a python script named 'kindlestrip'. It will significantly reduce the file sizes of mobi generated by kindlegen/kindle previewer, by removing the source files archived in the file. Or just send them to Amazon to put in your PD library, they strip the source archive (if there's one in there) before storing it.
Someday I hope amazon will add .epub to the formats that the conversion service handles.