Quote:
Originally Posted by rodrigoccurvo
Hi, everyone.
For a while I've been trying to understand Kindle's location and the consensus seems to be that for Mobi 1 location = 128 bytes (it's even on https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Page_numbers).
But today I was taking a look at the Amazon Cloud Reader (reader.amazon.com) source code and I found the following:
Code:
locationFromPosition: function (a) {
return Math.floor(a * 2 / 300 + 1)
}
(The file is KindleReaderApp-min.js, but I won't post the whole link since it's weird and I don't know if it has session informations. I guess you can find it on your own.)
The surrounding code is a bit larger, but in the end that seems to be the formula used for calculating the location for the Mobi format (there is another for topaz which is Math.floor((a * d + 100) / 100)).
I've tried looking at the parameter "a" and for the text parts it seems to be characters, but I don't know if that means bytes for every case. I've tested it a little bit just to know if it's correct and it seems to be, but not enough for me to be sure. Also, I don't know if the relation holds for images and other things apart from characters.
I don't know and couldn't find the original source for the 128 bytes information, so I'm guessing it's an approximation. But as I said, in my initial tests the above formula seems to work.
What to you guys think? Does it make sense? Is the 128 bytes info an approximation or is it on the format specs?
[]'s
Rodrigo |
Now, that's an interesting finding. And it can be checked fairly easily. My copy of The Lord of the Rings in Kindle for Mac has 24992 locations. The raw mobi-html is 3748684 bytes long. Plugging that into the forumla you've found, you get 24992 (.22666...). Taking the 128 bytes estimate, you get 29286 (.59375).
My LotR is encoded with Windows Latin-1. Let's see what happens with a UTF-8 encoded ebook. I suspect that we need to pass bytes, not characters.
My copy of Unfinished Tales is a (kindlegen compiled) conversion from an ePub. It's utf-8 encoded. It has 1590431 characters, but 1613151 bytes of mobi-html. In Kindle for Mac it has 10755 locations.
1590431*2/300+1 =10603 (.87333...)
1613151*2/300+1 =10755 (.34)
Well. That seems definite. The number of bytes (not characters) through the unpacked mobi-html of the book, when divided by 150, adding 1 and truncating, is the kindle location in the book.
Good find!