Kindle output versions

[DrewJohnson]

Hi.

I was wondering the different Kindle output versions available and if they’re really necessary….

When I buy a book from Amazon for my kindle I don’t choose a version and it arrives on my device and looks great. Does that mean that Amazon have different copies of the file available and send the one most appropriate to my device version?

I ask because I’ve made my first ebook available to readers and am distributing it through a charity, and I’ve converted it into all the different Kindle output versions offered by Calibre. I’m then asking my readers which version of Kindle they are using and sending the one that matches their device, which is a bit of a hassle.

I was therefore wondering how Amazon do it without requesting that information. Is it because Amazon’s version is somehow not device dependent or they cleverly behind the scenes determining which version they store best suits your registered device?

Or would it not really matter if I sent a Kindle PaperWhite 5 version to a user with a much older device with different screen dimensions to the PaperWhite 5?

Thanks in advance
Drew

[kovidgoyal]

Amazon does automatically send files optimized for the device requesting the file. As far as calibre is concerned, the difference betwene the kindle profiles is screen size which controls the max size of images in the document. Which only matters if you have large images. And you can mostly just use the largest profile, modern Kindles do a good job of downsampling images for display on smaller screens.

[DrewJohnson]

Thanks for the reply. That makes perfect sense. I think I will just send out the highest resolution screen size from now on and ask them to let me know if they have any issues with image sizes