Kindle to utilize epub format in late 2022

[madeirabhoy]

okay this is weird.
was using .mobi for years, now for the last few days I get the emails saying support for .mobi stopping.

changed to .epub
works except the punctuation is messed up.
follow the advice on here about using modify epub plugin, I used that for a day or two, no problems.
then yesterday sent an .epub file to a colleague, got email saying it could not be delivered.
Figured it could be because she has an actual kindle not an app, and maybe its older.
changed to .mobi and worked but got the email about august...

sent a .epub to my own kindle app that id ran Modify epub on, it didnt go through and got email. bearing in mind half a dozen files had gone through fine without problems this way.

converted to mobi. deleted .epub. sent again as .epub.

worked fine.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by madeirabhoy

sent a .epub to my own kindle app that id ran Modify epub on, it didnt go through and got email. bearing in mind half a dozen files had gone through fine without problems this way.

I have posted about this issue before:

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon converts emailed EPUBs using Kindlegen, the same software that is used to process professionally published books. As a publishing tool, Kindlegen is designed to be intolerant of errors in the source EPUB.

It would be nice if Amazon would provide the actual error log that Kindlegen produces when rejecting a book. However I don't see that happening as it would just be confusing to most customers. If you want to know why a book was rejected you can use Amazon's Kindle Previewer software to find out.

The most common reason I have seen is a bad table of contents. Amazon's publishing guidelines require the TOC to have working links that point to non-hidden content and entries that follow the same sequence as the book's content.

Here is Kovid Goyal's take on the subjectL

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

amazon's email intake is horrible. I have seen reports of them rejecting all sorts of epubs that display fine elsewhere. They are going to inconvenience a lot of people with this change.

Personally I suggest you stop relying on the email delivery service. It's too unreliable, for instance, the other day I had a report of it rejecting an epub simply because it had undecodable fonts in it. Fonts are entirely optional, they can be ignored if needed.

A publishing manuscript intake tool is not appropriate for processing general consumer epubs. Par for the course for amazon, though.

[Yammerhant]

Has Amazon stopped accepting MOBI format? I tried to send a document to my Kindle earlier today and received an error message - an hour later - titled "There was a problem with the document(s) that you sent to Kindle" and saying "The following document, sent by you at 08:16 PM on Wed, Jun 29, 2022 GMT, could not be delivered to the address you specified:" I have tried a few different documents, all MOBI, none very large, with the sam eresult - nothing makes it to my library and an error email comes straggling in an hour later.

[siebert]

I have the same issue that my MOBI file isn't accepted, but MOBI is still listed as a supported format in the error email I received (which also mentions that "Later this year, we’ll also be adding EPUB support to the free Kindle app for iOS and Android devices and the Send to Kindle desktop app for PC and Mac").

I hope that is only a temporary issue. It would be a major bummer if MOBI is discontinued before EPUBs are accepted via the "Send to Kindle" PC app.

[DNSB]

In my testing last week, both epub and mobi were accepted when I emailed them to my Kindle but every mobi file got me an email letting me know that Amazon would be dropping support for mobi. Most of the epubs looked pretty good converted to KF8/AZW3 but a couple looked like crap. Running epubcheck from Sigil and correcting the errors had those books looking pretty good as well. Overall, Amazon's process seems to be very unforgiving of most errors. Overall using calibre and sending via USB works better for me.

Dear Kindle Customer,

Thank you for using the Send to Kindle service to send personal documents to your Kindle library. We noticed that the following document(s), sent by you at 06:03 PM on Mon, Jun 27, 2022 PDT are in MOBI (.mobi, .azw) formats:
* Title Deleted - Author Expunged.mobi


We wanted to let you know that starting August 2022, you’ll no longer be able to send MOBI (.mobi, .azw) files to your Kindle library. Any MOBI files already in your Kindle library will not be affected by this change. MOBI is an older file format and will not support the newest Kindle features for documents. Any existing MOBI files you want to read with our most up-to-date features for documents will need to be re-sent in a compatible format.

Compatible formats now include EPUB (.epub), which you can send to your library using your Send to Kindle email address. We’ll also be adding EPUB support to the free Kindle app for iOS and Android devices and the Send to Kindle desktop app for PC and Mac.

If you have any questions, please visit our help page or contact our Customer Service team.

Regards,
Amazon Kindle Support

[jhowell]

I just tried emailing a MOBI to my Kindle an hour ago. I immediately received the email warning of the coming elimination of MOBI support. It took about 30 minutes before the book arrived on my Kindle. Slow but still working for me.

[siebert]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I just tried emailing a MOBI to my Kindle an hour ago. I immediately received the email warning of the coming elimination of MOBI support. It took about 30 minutes before the book arrived on my Kindle. Slow but still working for me.

Please note that I didn't use email but the "Send to Kindle" PC app.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by siebert

Please note that I didn't use email but the "Send to Kindle" PC app.

I tried just now to send a MOBI using the Send-to-Kindle app on my PC. It was delivered to the device in less than a minute.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by siebert

Please note that I didn't use email but the "Send to Kindle" PC app.

Looking at the email from Amazon:

Compatible formats now include EPUB (.epub), which you can send to your library using your Send to Kindle email address. We’ll also be adding EPUB support to the free Kindle app for iOS and Android devices and the Send to Kindle desktop app for PC and Mac.

It would appear that email to Kindle address is currently functioning for sending epubs but the Send to Kindle, iOS and Android apps will getting the support RSN. Hopefully before the August dropdead date.

The feeling of being an unwitting and unpaid beta tester...

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by DNSB

It would appear that email to Kindle address is currently functioning for sending epubs but the Send to Kindle, iOS and Android apps will getting the support RSN. Hopefully before the August dropdead date.

I suspect that Amazon will release new versions of the apps that simultaneously add EPUB and remove MOBI in August. The previous versions that allow MOBI will likely continue to work for some time after that before Amazon cuts them off.

[fendesa]

Originally Posted by celinego

I've just imported an epub into Calibre and sent it directly to my iphone kindle app and my kindle 7 (5th gen). I did go to Preferences/Sharing Books by Email and added EPUB to the two devices I'm sending to.

It worked. They both arrived but they are not properly formatted. There are a lot of symbols spread throughout the whole book. I then went back and converted the epub file to mobi. Then imported the mobi file and converted it back to epub and re-sent the second epub file. That worked and corrected the formatting too. No more symbols.

Is there an alternative way of correcting the formatting errors on the first epub file before sending so that they do arrive on the kindle without them? Or do you think Amazon will include any format corrections as part of the Send To Kindle process when it reaches the kindle or kindle app, without having to firstly do so in Calibre? Many thanks for any help.

try to reformatting the Epub in another Epub and than send to kindle (the 2nd Epub) I resolve the strange symbol and compress a little bit the size of the ebook. I think in the future update they resolve this problem of bad formatting.

Inviato dal mio MAR-LX1B utilizzando Tapatalk

[Solo1959]

I have had this very same problem. Just for giggles, I decided to try making the epub using Sigil. And it worked!

I noticed a difference on the top of the page of each file. In the Sigil creations there was this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

In the Calibre creations there was this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

I don't know what any of those heading do, but I do know that the Sigil version did get accepted by Amazon. And the Calibre one did not.

I don't know where else to look for differences but I didn't find any. There may be other places within the book, but not that I was able to find.

So, either use Sigil for now, or change the headings in your books to the Sigil wording. It worked for me.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Solo1959

I have had this very same problem. Just for giggles, I decided to try making the epub using Sigil. And it worked!

I noticed a difference on the top of the page of each file. In the Sigil creations there was this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

The creator of calibre, Kovid Goyal stated a while back:

As I have said before, you do not need doctypes in your ebooks. They serve no useful purpose. That remains just as true for EPUB 3 as it is for EPUB 2. The HTML standard has moved away from DTD (A DTD is what a doctype declares). As such I have no intentions of supporting doctype in calibre, regardless of versions of epub.

Which is pretty much correct in terms of uselessness. The problem is the HTML specs which state:

All HTML documents must start with a <!DOCTYPE> declaration.

The declaration is not an HTML tag. It is an "information" to the browser about what document type to expect.

For HTML5 used in epub3, the declaration is pretty simple - <!DOCTYPE html> - while for HTML4, it must include a DTD declaration.

My personal choice is to use Sigil as my epub editor of choice. Opening a calibre generated epub with Sigil will result in an error message:

You can either hit yes here or run Mend and prettify all HTML files or Mend all HTML files from the Reformat HTML option in the Tools menu. Note that EpubCheck no longer returns a missing Doctype as an error.

So far doing that and making sure EpubCheck returns no errors has allowed me to test the email to Kindle without issue.

[Geoff-D]

Originally Posted by fendesa

try to reformatting the Epub in another Epub and than send to kindle (the 2nd Epub) I resolve the strange symbol and compress a little bit the size of the ebook. I think in the future update they resolve this problem of bad formatting.

Inviato dal mio MAR-LX1B utilizzando Tapatalk

New forum member and first post. I ran into the garbled special character problem with epub documents yesterday. I generally email them to my Bezos account and things work fine. I opened the epub in Calibre and saw that the garble was coming from left & right single & double quotes and the em dash long hyphen. I just fat finger replace-all the left & right single & double quotes with regular single and double quote, and the em dash long hyphen with the regular dash character. I did “save a copy” and emailed that to Bezos land. Clunky but I wanted to read the book last night and it was fixed in a few minutes. It didn’t occur to me to try reforming from epub to epub. I’d only used Calibre to go from epub to mobi and then use their API to email the converted document to Amazon.

[Geoff-D]

Originally Posted by Geoff-D

New forum member and first post. I ran into the garbled special character problem with epub documents yesterday. I generally email them to my Bezos account and things work fine. I opened the epub in Calibre and saw that the garble was coming from left & right single & double quotes and the em dash long hyphen. I just fat finger replace-all the left & right single & double quotes with regular single and double quote, and the em dash long hyphen with the regular dash character. I did “save a copy” and emailed that to Bezos land. Clunky but I wanted to read the book last night and it was fixed in a few minutes. It didn’t occur to me to try reforming from epub to epub. I’d only used Calibre to go from epub to mobi and then use their API to email the converted document to Amazon.

So I did an epub to epub conversion in Calibre and that works perfectly. I emailed the converted file directly rather than let Calibre do it.

Thanks for the tip.