Thread: Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books
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Old 01-22-2026, 07:34 PM   #174
j.p.s
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
To gather some more information I took a look at one of my previously purchased books, Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2020 Edition. That book contains page numbers, fonts, and high quality images.

The book contains several large images. The first in the DRM-free EPUB is 1626x2442 pixels and 2.9 MB in size. I looked at the same image as delivered to Kindle apps in KFX and AZW3/AZW6 formats and none were as good. The closest was AZW6 which was 1626x2442 pixels and 2.0 MB. Next was KFX delivered to an app at 1278x1920 pixels and 1.7 MB. Worst was plain AZW3 at 917x1377 pixels and 120 KB. I suspect that the EPUB contains the original image as provided by the publisher.

Both the KFX and AZW3 versions of the book contain page numbers. The EPUB does not.
Thank you for your extensive and detailed investigation into this.

That epub has page number information in some non-standard format.

An azw3/azw6 fetched by a pw3 running early firmware also pulled apnx and XRAY. I suspect tha kindleunpack would build an EPUB with a page map or list, but I have no idea wheter that could be usefully folded into the amazon zupplied EPUB.

See below regarding images.

Quote:
Originally Posted by graycyn View Post
Sounds like the new downloadable Amazon epubs are a case of Amazon giveth (full resolution, color images) and Amazon taketh away (fonts, HTML5 accessible code, page-maps, author metadata).
I think the jury is still out on images. The example book from jhowell is a bunch of short stories each (most?) of which has a (large) color cover, (large enough) title page (image with sparse text on a white background ), small color author photo, and glyph like scene separators. No actual illustrations at all.

This is the only ebook I've received from amazon with a size larger that the filesize listed by amazon (99 MB vs I think 93 MB). The cover style were such that the jpgs are are actually susceptable to some significant lossless zip compression. The images alone in the unzipped epub take up 140 MB.

I'll leave it to someone else to let us know how large various forms of the book are with the images stripped.
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