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PulpAnd · 07-30-2025, 03:19 AM

Hi,
Long time lurker, first time poster! Hope I'm not posting this in the wrong place; making a new thread seemed excessive. I did scan several pages of posts here, but couldn't spot the information I'm after.

I was a blissfully happy user of Method 4 for about two years: Had my BlueStacks nicely configured, got my high-res covers and illustrations, pumped a couple of paychecks into the Kindle ecosystem. Panic-downloaded my whole library before the door shut! Very thankful for all the posts and tools here letting me archive some of my more recent purchases, which I would have missed, otherwise.

So, I pulled the plug. No more Kindle or Unlimited, switched to Kobo... for a couple of months. I found myself missing some of the Kindle exclusive series I'd started, and began to pine for the upcoming releases. So, I ordered a heavily-used Kindle PaperWhite, as recommended here and in other threads, for Method 3. I set it up, and my books do download and load into Calibre just fine. The device downloads the books in AZW3+AZW6, as described. Wonderful!

The image quality, however, suffers greatly. Some of my books include illustrations, and the Kindle is downloading poorly-compressed images. In the most extreme case, the BlueStacks version of one book was over 20MB in size, where the Kindle PW version is under 4MB. Resolution is nearly halved, with very obvious JPEG artifacting. Seeing this, I feel like a bootlegger!

Is there a way to get nicer AZW6 images out of my new, old Kindle? If not, is there a different way to get the images, and combine them with the AZW3 files?

Thank you for your time.

07-30-2025, 03:19 AM	#1133
PulpAnd Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2025 Device: Kobo Sage/Kindle PW/Calibre	Hi, Long time lurker, first time poster! Hope I'm not posting this in the wrong place; making a new thread seemed excessive. I did scan several pages of posts here, but couldn't spot the information I'm after. I was a blissfully happy user of Method 4 for about two years: Had my BlueStacks nicely configured, got my high-res covers and illustrations, pumped a couple of paychecks into the Kindle ecosystem. Panic-downloaded my whole library before the door shut! Very thankful for all the posts and tools here letting me archive some of my more recent purchases, which I would have missed, otherwise. So, I pulled the plug. No more Kindle or Unlimited, switched to Kobo... for a couple of months. I found myself missing some of the Kindle exclusive series I'd started, and began to pine for the upcoming releases. So, I ordered a heavily-used Kindle PaperWhite, as recommended here and in other threads, for Method 3. I set it up, and my books do download and load into Calibre just fine. The device downloads the books in AZW3+AZW6, as described. Wonderful! The image quality, however, suffers greatly. Some of my books include illustrations, and the Kindle is downloading poorly-compressed images. In the most extreme case, the BlueStacks version of one book was over 20MB in size, where the Kindle PW version is under 4MB. Resolution is nearly halved, with very obvious JPEG artifacting. Seeing this, I feel like a bootlegger! Is there a way to get nicer AZW6 images out of my new, old Kindle? If not, is there a different way to get the images, and combine them with the AZW3 files? Thank you for your time.