KFX Format

[jhowell]

It looks like Kindle books in Arabic are on their way. "KDP Now Supports Arabic eBooks (Beta)" according to a post on The Digital Reader.

I did some research and found that a bunch of free Arabic language books were made available on amazon.com about a week ago. There is even a (non-free) Harry Potter book available.

It appears that Arabic is only supported on the iOS and Android (including Fire OS) apps currently. They cannot be delivered to Kindle for PC or e-ink Kindles.

They also appear to be KFX only. All have Enhanced Typesetting and do not support "Download & Transfer via USB".

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by jhowell

It looks like Kindle books in Arabic are on their way. "KDP Now Supports Arabic eBooks (Beta)" according to a post on The Digital Reader.

I did some research and found that a bunch of free Arabic language books were made available on amazon.com about a week ago. There is even a (non-free) Harry Potter book available.

It appears that Arabic is only supported on the iOS and Android (including Fire OS) apps currently. They cannot be delivered to Kindle for PC or e-ink Kindles.

They also appear to be KFX only. All have Enhanced Typesetting and do not support "Download & Transfer via USB".

It looks like they are not available for any eink Kindle yet. None of my eink Kindles are supported either for the sample or purchase (only looked at the Harry Potter book so far).

No support for eink Kindles would also automatically shut down the download and transfer via usb which only works for eink.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

It looks like they are not available for any eink Kindle yet. None of my eink Kindles are supported either for the sample or purchase (only looked at the Harry Potter book so far).

I mentioned that in my post. It looks like Arabic support has not yet been added to those devices.

It makes sense to me that Amazon would prioritize making them available on Android and iOS. After all, those who speak Arabic are unlikely to own a Kindle since that language was not previously available there.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

No support for eink Kindles would also automatically shut down the download and transfer via usb which only works for eink.

That is not true. Download and transfer also normally works for Fire tablets, but it doesn't show up as an option for these books.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I mentioned that in my post. It looks like Arabic support has not yet been added to those devices.

There is a difference between books. While the Harry Potter sample you posted does work correctly with RTL text and swiping "backwards" to advance, others do not. This one can be delivered to eink Kindles, but also does not allow download and transfer (at least the sample does not). But it also does not work right either on android app or my Oasis 2. Text is left-justified instead of right-justified, and advancing pages goes with a swipe from right to left (both wrong on eink and app).

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

There is a difference between books. While the Harry Potter sample you posted does work correctly with RTL text and swiping "backwards" to advance, others do not. This one can be delivered to eink Kindles...

The Tom Sawyer book you found is different from the other Arabic language books I have seen. The others have "(Arabic Edition)" appended to the title, but that book has "Arabic edition" without the parentheses. More importantly it is coded incorrectly for Arabic. The metadata indicates LTR instead or RTL reading direction. It also embeds fonts instead of relying on the built in ones. I suspect that it isn't an "official" Arabic-language book, but something improperly published.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

... but also does not allow download and transfer (at least the sample does not).

That is normal for samples.

[Notjohn]

Publisher: Mark Twain (December 17, 2017)

Wasn't it Mark Twain who said something to the effect that the reports of his death had been exaggerated?

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Kindle Previewer version 3.17 has been released. The main change was adding support for MathML in KFX format.

I came across a little more information on support for MathML in Kindle e-books.

The 2017.4 release of the NVDA screen reader for windows includes:

Early support for reading and interactive navigation of mathematical content for Kindle books with accessible math. (#7536)

The link to GitHub contains some technical details:

Summary of the issue:
A future version of Kindle will expose MathML for books which contain it. We can thus provide access to math in those books using our existing math support.
...
Known issues with pull request:
No known issues with the implementation. One concern is that content probably won't be publicly available before NVDA 2017.4 is released, so this won't get any public testing before release. However, we don't want to wait until 2018.1 for this to be available, so we're announcing it as "early support".

So, looks like it is coming soonish.

[JSWolf]

And just think of all those Kindles out there where this will not work. For wider support, use SVG math instead.

[wzyboy]

I came across this thread and spent quite a few hours to read thru it. This is fascinating.

As people pointed out, there is currently not much use for DRM-free KFX files, as the format could only be read with Kindles.

I mostly agree, but I would also like to share a valid use case of DRM-free KFX files: to read eBooks from two different Amazon accounts on one Kindle device.

Why do I need two Amazon accounts? Because I buy books from both Amazon.com and Amazon.cn but these two websites have different account systems. You can use Amazon.com account to log into Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.in, etc, but not Amazon.cn and Amazon.co.jp.

So I use Kindle for PC to download books purchased with account A, de-DRM them, and transfer them to Kindle Paperwhite 3 (which is registered to account B) to read.

I like the new features of KFX, especially Page Flip, but before I discovered the Pascal and Python demo to remove DRM from KFX files, I have to use an old version of K4PC to get KF8 versions, which do not support Page Flip.

[jhowell]

Kindle for PC 1.23 has been delivered to some customers, possibly as a beta or a slow roll-out.

What's new in Kindle for PC 1.23.1

1. New Fonts : You can choose from six new fonts (Baskerville, Caecillia, Helvetica, Helvetica Light, Lucida, Palatino) in addition to Bookerly, Amazon Ember, Amazon Ember Bold and Open Dyslexic in the Aa(Fonts) menu.

2. Two Column mode : You can now choose to read with one column, two columns or with the number of columns determined automatically based on the font size selected and the page width.

3. Viewer for Images, Math equations and Footnotes - Double click on an Image / Math equation to launch the viewer.

4. Split View support : You can now read in Split View on your PC

I wonder whether "Math equation" refers to support for MathML. There have been signs of that feature coming to the Kindle platform since last year.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Kindle for PC 1.23 has been delivered to some customers, possibly as a beta or a slow roll-out.



I wonder whether "Math equation" refers to support for MathML. There have been signs of that feature coming to the Kindle platform since last year.

I honestly can't quite figure what ELSE it would be. I mean...you don't need a special feature to look at/zoom images of equations, so...

Hitch

[jhowell]

The latest update to the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines includes MathML support. However the description is a bit spare:

9.6 MathML Support

Enhanced Typesetting supports MathML.

Supported Tags: ...
Unsupported Tags: ...

Troubleshooting: Open the HTML page with MathJax. If MathML is displayed without any issues, then it will be supported in Enhanced Typesetting.

MathML is supported in KFX format (Enhanced Typesetting), but what about MOBI and KF8?

The guidelines do not mention them and there is no sign of MathML support for KF8 in the latest Kindle firmware (5.9.5). I believe that it is unlikely that Amazon would update the renderers for the older formats anyway.

They also do not mention any type of fallback, such as with media queries. Perhaps they plan on replacing MathML with images for KF8/MOBI in the publishing workflow. A more likely possibility is that if you include MathML in a published book then it will only be made available on devices that support Enhanced Typesetting. (This is already the case for Indic and Arabic language books.)

I suppose that we need someone to publish a book with MathML to see what actually happens.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I suppose that we need someone to publish a book with MathML to see what actually happens.

Also it's probably another thing locked to publishers only who upload directly via FTP, and not Self-Publishers and people who go through KDP.

[jhowell]

Amazon has released version 6.6 of the Kindle for iOS app. One of the new features listed is:

* Read your favorite magazines in a new mobile-friendly format. Initial titles include Food Network, Cosmopolitan, Life & Style, Us Weekly, and 15 others.

As is typical for new Kindle features these days, the new magazine format is a variant of KFX.

Added: I tried it and lets you switch between reading the magazine page-by-page or by article content.

The changes are incremental improvements. Switching in and out of article view is done a bit differently and articles are more nicely formatted using Enhanced Typesetting. You can view a grid of pages in the magazine or in pages just in articles in Page Flip mode.

There may be other, more subtle, changes that I didn't notice.

The file size is about the same. The magazine I tested with, the May 1 issue of Food Network, was 81MB as a single PRC (MOBI) file in the Android app and 87MB as a set of 32 KFX files in the iOS app.

[KindleAZWorKFX]

ok, so I fixed my subfolder problem by configure the Calibre device icon, option where you can configure this device "Configure amazon device" box and unclick Use Sub Directory's option, that should fix it so now all files are put into the document folder and not sub folders, I don't no fix that will fix the hard rebooting problem that just started with the newest firmware, I just notice that when I went to use my kindle paperwhite 2 tonight it was in the process of rebooting the device, not sure if I left it in an eBook or if something in the newest firmware is causing the Kindle paperwhite gen 6 hardware to reboot itself, so again I don't no why it was starting up when I pick up the device and open the e-readers case tonight was in the process of rebooting the kindle on its own when I had grab it from my computer desk, in any case if it stores all the KFX output plugin formated files inside the main folder, from calibre it should be no problem for it to generate thumbnails with ExtractCoverThumbs_1.0.0-py now, of course that doesn't fix the hardware problem that just started yesterday when I updated its firmware.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/firmwaredow...v2_5.9.6.1.bin

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custo...deId=201307450


Just wondering is it better to use calibre and change the compress images loseless to enable lossy compression of JPEG images to make say an 80MB or 50MB sized epub ebook before converting them to azw3 or kfx format for your kindle paperwhite 2 device to keep it from hard rebooting on free ebook etc or, use kindlegen and enable -gif format to change the jpeg and use say something like kindlegen -c2 -gif %1 settings for a bat executable command line option for changing jpeg into -gif format, is that smaller or better option when viewing the images on your paperwhite device, making this a bit shorter for that user etc.. that reply back , anyway I am not sure how much quality to lose when resizing jpeg images, since it seems when using a setting like 40 under enable lossy compression of jpeg images that it creates spots in the images, but at the same time it does make the total ebook size smaller, which may be ok for an paperwhite 2 device, but not my android 10.1 tablet you may notice more image artifacts under that hardware, I guess I could keep two copy's of the same ebook with different settings for both devices, just wondering if you use the jpeg settings or think that using kindlegen with -c2 and -gif and then use say the plugin Kindleunpack afterwards etc.. to make it better since it splits the mobi and azw3 files apart but of course it seems that their new kfx format is bigger than just using the older formats when using the kfx format, its both an mobi and azw3 total inside the file I think, if you understand that Kindleunpack cannot split the kfx format file, which is what amazon is using in their new mobi format (kfx format I think since kindle preview 3 outputs the converted files as mobi format with kfx in them if I understand the app itself right.