Thread: Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books
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Old 06-23-2026, 04:34 PM   #377
jhowell
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Posts: 7,376
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Charlottesville, VA
Device: Kindles
Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli View Post
I'm yet to see a PDF.

Has anyone here gotten a PDF file instead? And what kind of ebook was that, if so?
From earlier in this thread:

Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
I looked at the newest 250 Kindle book purchases on my account and of those 21 were downloadable. Nine came as .pdf and the other twelve as .zip that I needed to rename to .epub.

Now that I have this feature I can confirm that the EPUBs look like those produced by Amazon's Kindle Create tool. One style sheet per chapter, lots of <div>'s and <span>'s, each with its own class, but no semantic markup such as <p> or <h>.

All of the books that downloaded for me as PDF are reflowable on Kindle. I don't see any particular pattern other than they are mostly larger and more complex books. Perhaps if the conversion to EPUB fails they fallback to delivering PDF instead.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
As far as I can tell a PDF is generated from a reflowable book in cases where Amazon's export to EPUB fails for some reason. I have not yet seen any PDFs produced from fixed-layout books, such as comics.

The content is generated from the Kindle edition, not a scan of a paper edition. Text can be searched and highlighted. Images are high resolution. External links work, however internal ones appear to be broken.

The PDF is sized like a typical hard cover book using 5.5x8.5 inch pages. For me it would be difficult to read on a typical e-reader screen. (See attached.)
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