Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Does anyone know if the eBook has graphics in witht he main text and are hi-res, does the ePub keep the graphics at the correct resolution and in color if the graphics are originally in color?

When this thread started, my biggest hope was that it would be a way to get the same quality images in books bought from amazon as in epubs bought elsewhere. Based on recent reports that hope has been dashed, as is the hope that the rest of the epub being the same or mostly preserved.

Does anyone know whether any page number info in the book as supplied by the publisher is preserved in or stripped from these amazon corrupted epubs?

(Also, does anyeon have an opinion whether the metadata fiasco is due to haste, laziness, incompetence, or spite?)

[el_vandragon]

The images are in color, I have no way of knowing if they are full quality or not, so far the only images I have seen are book covers, and then at the end of the book where they mention something like "Also check out these books" and have more color covers.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Anybody noticed any embedded fonts in those downloaded epubs? I suspect they get deleted, but I have too few downloadable ebooks at the moment to be certain.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Does anyone know if the eBook has graphics in witht he main text and are hi-res, does the ePub keep the graphics at the correct resolution and in color if the graphics are originally in color?

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Does anyone know whether any page number info in the book as supplied by the publisher is preserved in or stripped from these amazon corrupted epubs?

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.

The KFX version of the book contains two fonts, Charis SIL and Charis SIL Bold. Neither of those files appear in the DRM-free EPUB or in the AZW3 file. (The AZW3 does have @font-face CSS entries for those fonts pointing to a non-existent filename of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.) So it does appear that fonts are left out in the generation of EPUBs by Amazon.

Both the KFX and AZW3 versions of the book contain page numbers. The EPUB does not.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jhowell

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.

The KFX version of the book contains two fonts, Charis SIL and Charis SIL Bold. Neither of those files appear in the DRM-free EPUB or in the AZW3 file. (The AZW3 does have @font-face CSS entries for those fonts pointing to a non-existent filename of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.) So it does appear that fonts are left out in the generation of EPUBs by Amazon.

Both the KFX and AZW3 versions of the book contain page numbers. The EPUB does not.

Thank you. So it does seem that the graphics are not messed up.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Does anyone know if the eBook has graphics in witht he main text and are hi-res, does the ePub keep the graphics at the correct resolution and in color if the graphics are originally in color?

As it happens, I can answer one part, as the epub I downloaded happened to have a little color graphic as a chapter ornament.

It's in color, as is the cover. So, this is a way to retrieve color content if one is normally accessing books from a BW older Kindle.

As for whether the graphics are the same resolution, I don't know. EDIT: Oops, didn't read far enough. Sounds like the graphics are the originals, which is good.

But fonts left out and page-maps, not so good. And I certainly hope that no one who needs a screen-reader buys an Amazon DRM-free book hoping the epub is accessible...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

As it happens, I can answer one part, as the epub I downloaded happened to have a little color graphic as a chapter ornament.

It's in color, as is the cover. So, this is a way to retrieve color content if one is normally accessing books from a BW older Kindle.

As for whether the graphics are the same resolution, I don't know.

The cover's I have in the two books I downloaded are both hi-res where I know one of them was not hi-res when I was downloaded as KF8.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The cover's I have in the two books I downloaded are both hi-res where I know one of them was not hi-res when I was downloaded as KF8.

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).

My buying will, undoubtedly, mostly stay outside of Amazon, though I may make occasional exception.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by graycyn

But fonts left out and page-maps, not so good.

For jhowell's (free) example, page information is in ncx.ncx as navPoints and opf.opf as item href and itemref idref. I don't know whether that is on amazon or on Tor. (Or is that an official EPUB3 to do pages?)

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jhowell

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.

Originally Posted by graycyn

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.

[lkmiller]

Just curious: For books that have a pdf instead of epub download, are those a mess?

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by lkmiller

Just curious: For books that have a pdf instead of epub download, are those a mess?

Ken Liu's Passing of the Dragon downloads as a PDF. And it just looks like a book would look like. Not sure though, why they chose to provide a fixed layout format for download, since I was able to simply extract an epub from the azw file just fine.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by lkmiller

Just curious: For books that have a pdf instead of epub download, are those a mess?

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.)

[rashkae]

One of my previously purchased books just became available to dowload today. It was published in January of 2024. The quality of the images was *extremely* high and a massive upgrade to any of my previous downloads. (up to 3000px wide. no visible jpg artifacts.)

The Book Css internals looked just fine after going through calibre conversion. The only odd thing was downloading with the .zip extension instead of a .epub.

I still haven't been able to find any indication on the books detail page that it would be downloadable.

The previous books in the same series by the same author are not made available. I wonder if Amazon is walking backwards to convert backlist titles, (or if, for some on reasn, the Author only enabled this one book.)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by rashkae

One of my previously purchased books just became available to dowload today. It was published in January of 2024. The quality of the images was *extremely* high and a massive upgrade to any of my previous downloads. (up to 3000px wide. no visible jpg artifacts.)

The Book Css internals looked just fine after going through calibre conversion. The only odd thing was downloading with the .zip extension instead of a .epub.

I still haven't been able to find any indication on the books detail page that it would be downloadable.

The previous books in the same series by the same author are not made available. I wonder if Amazon is walking backwards to convert backlist titles, (or if, for some on reasn, the Author only enabled this one book.)

Are you using a Mac? If so, that's why it's a zip extension instead of an epub extension.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are you using a Mac? If so, that's why it's a zip extension instead of an epub extension.

Chromium-based browsers on Windows also give a zip file.