Kindle to utilize epub format in late 2022

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon is particularly picky about the internal table of contents. Links that are out of sequence or that point to undisplayable content can cause the EPUB to be rejected.

I feel like Amazon is just discouraging sideloading your own books at this point.

My brain just doesn't like it when something is out of place or different from the others (in this case send-to-kindle books vs usb sideloaded books). It's really making me consider removing all the books on my kindle and just sideloading everything again via usb.

The only problem is I'm gonna lose my reading positions. If only Kindles were like Kobo were I could make a back up of my reading positions through Calibre and restore it later on.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by hleo12

I don't really view the covers while I'm inside the book. I just want my library to look pretty. Specially now that list view also includes thumbnails.

The odd thing is that inside the Kindle apps (iOS, Android) you'll see your covers in your library just fine and in full color, or at least they'll display that way after you've opened the book once. I'm not sure why e-ink is the unloved stepchild.

To me, it just seems pointless to give one's customers a disjointed and inexplicable experience like this. Of course the horror of getting MOBI for a personal document on iOS is yet another example... The test epub I sent looks beautiful on my Kindle, great on my Android phone, but on my iPad ... UGH!

You'd think that the idea would be to provide a uniform and pleasing experience across devices rather than going out of the way to NOT do so...

But I'm not rich like Bezos, so what do I know? 😁


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon is particularly picky about the internal table of contents. Links that are out of sequence or that point to undisplayable content can cause the EPUB to be rejected.

They sure take the fun out of creative ebook design.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by graycyn

But I'm not rich like Bezos, so what do I know? 😁

Jeff's market and research team are probably too advanced for us common folks to understand


Give us our covers!!!!!

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by tomsem

They sure take the fun out of creative ebook design.

I wonder if this affects those choose your own adventure books like Goosebumps (are they even available in ebook format?)

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by graycyn

The odd thing is that inside the Kindle apps (iOS, Android) you'll see your covers in your library just fine and in full color, or at least they'll display that way after you've opened the book once. I'm not sure why e-ink is the unloved stepchild.

To me, it just seems pointless to give one's customers a disjointed and inexplicable experience like this. Of course the horror of getting MOBI for a personal document on iOS is yet another example... The test epub I sent looks beautiful on my Kindle, great on my Android phone, but on my iPad ... UGH!

You'd think that the idea would be to provide a uniform and pleasing experience across devices rather than going out of the way to NOT do so...

But I'm not rich like Bezos, so what do I know? 😁


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

To me, it looks bad everywhere: I like left-justified text and am too lazy to apply style before sending it. To the extent that I get around to reading any of this, I read it with Apple Books.

iOS is more restrictive about the layout engine you can use, I think it has to be WebKit. It used to look much, much worse before Amazon came up with an iOS specific delivery format. But personal docs don’t get this feature.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by tomsem

To me, it looks bad everywhere: I like left-justified text and am too lazy to apply style before sending it. To the extent that I get around to reading any of this, I read it with Apple Books.

iOS is more restrictive about the layout engine you can use, I think it has to be WebKit. It used to look much, much worse before Amazon came up with an iOS specific delivery format. But personal docs don’t get this feature.

That's exactly it. Personal docs aren't included, so they look pretty bad in the iOS Kindle app. The same epub will look beautiful in the Apple Books app.

Seems bad advertising for Kindle if folks should compare. I drop epubs into Apple Books from Dropbox, they look lovely. Send one to Kindle documents service and it's a horror show in Kindle for iPad, LOL!

Oh well! At least I know what's going to happen. But I feel for the folks who don't.

[GeniusJ]

The problem I have with all of this is that Amazon does a poor job of converting EPUB (sent via "send to Kindle") to their proprietary format that gets delivered to Kindle readers and iOS. It doesn't properly format fonts, punctuation, etc. It works fine with MOBI, but EPUBs look like garbage.

What does work is converting the EPUB to MOBI, delete the EPUB, and convert back from MOBI to EPUB, *then* send it to Kindle. The Calibre conversion process seems to strip out all the stuff that Amazon's conversion process can't handle... but boy is it a convoluted way to do it.

[kbs24]

Gotta have the covers.

[GeniusJ]

Originally Posted by jhowell

In calibre UTF-8 encoding is assumed but for historical reasons Amazon's conversion assumes ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1). The result is usually seen as quotation marks turning into odd character sequences like ’.

How do I fix this?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by hleo12

Update

I played around with the updated personal documents. Amazon is sending the documents to Kindles as azw3 format now. So we have the enhanced typesetting. That's really the only difference. We can't really take advantage of any of the azw3 features because Amazon doesn't allow metadata on personal documents.

While I'm happy with the options for more fonts, I'd still rather have covers.

Not quite correct. Enhanced formatting is only available to KFX and not KF8.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GeniusJ

How do I fix this?

Convert your ePub to UTF-8.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Convert your ePub to UTF-8.

An interesting suggestion since an ePub MUST use either UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding (Unicode is mandatory). Admittedly, I've only seen 2 epubs that used UTF-16. Any other encoding is non-standard and will be flagged by almost any epub checker as a fatal error.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Not quite correct. Enhanced formatting is only available to KFX and not KF8.

Is there a big difference between the extra font options of azw3/kf8 and kfx's enhanced typesetting?

I just saw calibre converts to kfx. Since I would be sideloading books via usb once email mobi support is gone, should I just convert books to kfx and transfer those to my kindle?

I tried it and the only difference I could see is kfx has the alignment enabled.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

An interesting suggestion since an ePub MUST use either UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding (Unicode is mandatory). Admittedly, I've only seen 2 epubs that used UTF-16. Any other encoding is non-standard and will be flagged by almost any epub checker as a fatal error.

Dodgy eBooks illegally downloaded from the net can have incorrect encoding.