MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Tweak Book function somehow damages e-book

Archibald Yates · 11-22-2012, 11:51 AM

Hello forum!

I have got a problem with the Tweak Book function.

Why I want to use it at all:

I own a Kindle Touch and want to buy some Kindle e-books of a publisher who a) very often uses fonts in his paper books that are at least for me too small for comfortable reading and b) does not seem to like e-books because not only he sells them for the same or even a higher price than the printed books but also he does format them terribly. Most of all the paragraphs are justified and have huge whitespaces between the words.

In short: Paper books: ouch, e-books: yuck.

So I played around a little with Calibre and discovered the Tweak Book function which "explodes" the AZW3 file into its components: HTML text, CSS style &c.

Since I know a bit about CSS and HTML I took a sample of a a Kindle book I want to buy and exploded it in Calibre. Then I added "text-align: left" to all paragraph styles of the text body, saved the changed CSS file and rebuild the sample.

When I opened it with the Kindle and with the Kindle app for Mac the paragraphs where de-justified like I had intended and for a moment I was happy. Then I noticed that the exploding/rebuilding routine had added a weird o> to the end of the file. But worse: When I clicked on "further informations about the book" or "buy book" at the end of the sample the Amazon web store did not recognize it anymore as a sample.

So my guess is if I process a full purchased e-book the way I did with the excerpt Amazon will not recognize that either. Which means that it doesn't get synched in the cloud. That would be as if I hadn't bought the book at Amazon at all.

Is that alteration a bug, did I do something wrong or is there a completely different way to tweak the appearance of books just a tiny bit while leaving everything else including the DRM intact? Or is this just a sample only behaviour?

I know that there is a Kindle tweak that allows to switch of justification. But neither does it work with the Kindle Touch nor do I want to jailbreak my Kindle.

Any help is much appreciated.

11-22-2012, 11:51 AM	#1
Archibald Yates Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Kindle 4, Kindle Touch 3G	Tweak Book function somehow damages e-book Hello forum! I have got a problem with the Tweak Book function. Why I want to use it at all: I own a Kindle Touch and want to buy some Kindle e-books of a publisher who a) very often uses fonts in his paper books that are at least for me too small for comfortable reading and b) does not seem to like e-books because not only he sells them for the same or even a higher price than the printed books but also he does format them terribly. Most of all the paragraphs are justified and have huge whitespaces between the words. In short: Paper books: ouch, e-books: yuck. So I played around a little with Calibre and discovered the Tweak Book function which "explodes" the AZW3 file into its components: HTML text, CSS style &c. Since I know a bit about CSS and HTML I took a sample of a a Kindle book I want to buy and exploded it in Calibre. Then I added "text-align: left" to all paragraph styles of the text body, saved the changed CSS file and rebuild the sample. When I opened it with the Kindle and with the Kindle app for Mac the paragraphs where de-justified like I had intended and for a moment I was happy. Then I noticed that the exploding/rebuilding routine had added a weird o> to the end of the file. But worse: When I clicked on "further informations about the book" or "buy book" at the end of the sample the Amazon web store did not recognize it anymore as a sample. So my guess is if I process a full purchased e-book the way I did with the excerpt Amazon will not recognize that either. Which means that it doesn't get synched in the cloud. That would be as if I hadn't bought the book at Amazon at all. Is that alteration a bug, did I do something wrong or is there a completely different way to tweak the appearance of books just a tiny bit while leaving everything else including the DRM intact? Or is this just a sample only behaviour? I know that there is a Kindle tweak that allows to switch of justification. But neither does it work with the Kindle Touch nor do I want to jailbreak my Kindle. Any help is much appreciated. Last edited by Archibald Yates; 11-22-2012 at 12:03 PM.