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Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
KFX is nothing to do with presentation despite what Amazon say.
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Not true. Whether or not a book is in KFX format definitely impacts its presentation to the user.
Kindle reading apps and devices have multiple renderers for books in reflowable formats. The renderer used depends on the particular format in which the book is delivered to the device. The original MOBI renderer is based on a subset of HTML 3 and is the least capable. KF8 uses an outdated version of webkit and supports much richer formatting. KFX is totally proprietary to Amazon and adds things not available with the older renderers, like automatic hyphenation and ligature substitution.
Now, as JSWolf points out, Amazon could have improved e-book presentation using a more standard approach. But as things stand now KFX is required to enable some presentation features.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Nor have publishers/uploaders any control over the conversion process other than choosing epub, mobi, docx etc as the upload format.
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This is also untrue. The publisher has the ability to control this by using only supported features in the books they send to Amazon. Some features of the various source formats cannot currently be converted to KFX format. These are (somewhat) documented in the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines. And Amazon provides a tool, Kindle Previewer 3, that will indicate in advance whether or not a book can be converted to KFX.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Certain kinds of Amazon electronic books are not traditional ebooks (such as some textbooks) and don't work on eink based readers at all. They are converted differently and are more like PDFs.
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There is a difference between reflowable and fixed layouts and the formats that support them. There are also new KFX variants of the original formats used for textbooks, magazines and comics with capabilities beyond those provided by the original renderers for those formats.