10 ms·

Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

225 points by umvi 6y ago

monadic2 6y ago
They still read epub, right? Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.
- mikece 6y ago
  Mobi, ePub, and MS Word (not sure how good Libre Office is at this though) were all acceptable formats last time I checked.
- turtlebits 6y ago
  Nope, IIRC, the only open ebook format supported is mobi. Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).
  - liability 6y ago
    They also load PDFs and plain text files (IIRC) though those are not quite 'eBook formats.'
    - monadic2 6y ago
      I've personally found the pdf on kindle experience to be absolutely frustrating but YMMV I'm sure.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Ack you're right... same conclusion though.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
  >They still read epub, right? No, and they never did.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  No. A lot of people use Calibre to convert epubs to mobi before loading them on their kindles.
bluedays 6y ago
Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mikece 6y ago
  Are there jailbreaks and/or custom ROMs for Kindles? It's a nice little device; would be a lot nicer without it constantly phoning home to Amazon.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    You can stick koreader on them. Of course you'll have to go through the trouble of de-DRMing your content, but it's not that hard using Calibre. At that point you should just buy a Kobo forma, which is much nicer hardware.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Yes! Jailbreak thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186645 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186645 (Note that in some cases it requires opening the plastic and ordering some cable off of Amazon.) The only custom ROM I know about that supports Kindle devices is KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader). I don't like its interface one bit, but feature-wise it gets the job done just fine. There's also Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato) for Kobo devices, though KOReader works there as well. In my experience jailbreaking a Kobo device is much less painful.
    - se32point1 6y ago
      I've done it before on a really old Kindle... KOReader isn't precisely an alternate firmware. It's just a piece of software you run on the Kindle in place of the default, and it does have its advantages, at least on my old Kindle: for example, I could enable Night Mode and read ePubs. It also supported connecting to Calibre wirelessly which was also convenient-ish (Calibre still eats up MIME types and I was very happy on the day I could finally uninstall it, and KOReader doesn't support using USB to transfer without first stopping KOReader). Other than that, maybe it's because my Kindle was aging, but the battery life seemed to worsen dramatically after jailbreaking, and I had to downgrade to an older firwmare in order to jailbreak it. The Kindle was getting old and I bought a Kobo anyway (in part because I'm tired of contributing to Amazon's empire, and further propelled by the fact that it supports Adobe DRM'ed ePubs [and well, while I don't like DRM, it's nice to be able to have the option of using my local library's ebooks]). I'd think you're correct about the Kobo's jailbreaking (haven't tried it myself, but I do intend on doing it in the future, and perhaps developing software for it), but I know already it's much, much easier to customize, thanks to the wonderful hidden folder with the Kobo eReader.conf file, where you can, for example, set the power button to screenshot (which disables the power button, but I have an aftermarket magnetic sleep cover, so this isn't an issue).
mikece 6y ago
Sigil still seems like a perfectly valid option for creating and editing ebooks on Linux (and macOS and Windows): https://sigil-ebook.com/about/ https://sigil-ebook.com/about/
- teraflop 6y ago
  Sigil only supports creating ePub files, which Kindles can't natively read. The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.
  - liability 6y ago
    > kindlegen Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.
      - liability 6y ago
        That's fair. I'd probably put more effort into figuring it out if I thought I needed more features than `ebook-convert` exposes.
    - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
      I've used it successfully. "Good" is probably more enthusiasm than I would use to describe it, but it was adequate.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      I've used both at times but kindlegen sometimes failed to convert books correctly whereas calibre did not, so at least anecdotally calibre seemed better.
inetsee 6y ago
The linked page doesn't actually say that Linux is no longer supported. You need to go to the Previewer Product page https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765... then scroll down to the System Requirements, where it says "Windows 8.1 or later, Intel Mac OSX 10.13 or later".
acidburnNSA 6y ago
Oh dang. I used this to publish my first (and only) eBook as the final chain in my Sphinx based workflow. It was fun to publish a book on Amazon. I'm not sure I would have tried it if the Linux tooling hadn't been there.
swiley 6y ago
Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?
  - snazz 6y ago
    Yeah, this decision makes business sense for Amazon. Updating a Linux client is a nice gesture but affects a very small parentage of desktop users.
    - peterdemin 6y ago
      That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but multibillion corporation cuts it for “business sense”.
      - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        It's precisely because the enthusiasts are doing it for free that makes it viable. When a corporation manages Linux software, even if the software is freely available, they're paying for support time -- and if they're developing the software, as in this case, the development time.
        danilocesar 6y ago
        exactly! Another way to see it: engineering is the easy/cheap part. Testing, supporting, maintaining and marketing are way more expensive, and those are long-term expenses. The enthusiast usually thinks about the engineering bits, and when he's done with it he's done with it. Enterprise software is not like that - or shouldn't be :)
      - mdoms 6y ago
rriepe 6y ago
Wow, huge bummer. This is how I generated and edited my Kindle book... not sure what to do now.
- toyg 6y ago
  Generate ePub and convert using something like Calibre's ebook-convert? At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
  - liability 6y ago
    > At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...? That's what epubs are, plain old zip files with some xhtml, CSS, etc. You can unzip them using standard utilities. Mobi files aren't zips, but the premise is roughly the same and conversion between the two is usually seamless.
    - Turing_Machine 6y ago
      It's almost, but not quite "plain". You have to make sure that the mimetype file is the very first file in the zip, and that the mimetype file is uncompressed. Otherwise the epub will fail validation and will not work on many readers. So yeah, you can unzip them with any standard zip utility, but zipping them back up requires some care.
- vetinari 6y ago
  If you have your copy of kindlegen, it will continue to work - it is a 32-bit statically linked binary, so as long as your kernel supports 32-bit processes and 32-bit ELF files, you are good to go. That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it didn't run on Catalina at all.
  - rriepe 6y ago
    Ironically I've just made a Mac-to-Linux workflow change. I can probably still figure something out with another machine and Windows. Thanks for the tip though.
leephillips 6y ago
Kindle can handle PDF (and plain text) natively. If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. Also, it’s the only reasonable choice if your book has math or anything else typographically challenging.
- Arainach 6y ago
  >offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. [[CITATION NEEDED]] PDFs still don't reflow when changing the text size.
- liability 6y ago
  > If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own personal use, not for distribution.)
  - leephillips 6y ago
    You and the other reply are correct about font sizes. I thought it was obvious that, if you are generating different files for different screen sizes, you can also generate large-type versions. This can all be automated. Why bother? Because the usual format for Kindle books looks bad, like webpages. And, as I said, forget about math, etc.
    - liability 6y ago
      Having two font settings to choose from is a degraded user experience. You're also missing the margin and line spacing settings, as well as font style. Also TTS sucks with PDFs but works excellent with reflowable formats (this one is important to me personally.) > the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages. Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided. > math This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than offering dozens of PDF variations.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
Personally I use Send to Kindle for sending ebooks (which I get from Humble Bundle from time to time) to my Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by email with this service. Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.
- k1m 6y ago
  > Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin. That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send documents to the device). I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet provide. More info on recent changes here: https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-changes.html https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-chang...
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I'm not sure how much of a big deal this is in practice. Amazon's KindleGen tool was never open source, and Kindle-specific book formats are proprietary. And, while this is admittedly anecdotal, I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that Linux users tend toward the, hmm, opinionated when it comes to certain things, licensing chief among them. Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those workflows are still available.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  Yeah, you can upload an epub to Amazon's Kindle publishing portal, and it will convert it and provide a download link for the converted version (if you want to double-check it before hitting "Publish" -- recommended).
jonhohle 6y ago
A fun `kindlegen` story from my past: When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go, the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut for launch. Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however, those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team (justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file (e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to would need to change. Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially, their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted several months to implement the feature. Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references, and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively. This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now. It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow, but the tide will continue. ¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.
jwiley 6y ago
Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox: - supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR - no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me - is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking - could it be sold? Possibly: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten-sell-kobo https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten... - is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes with their support - does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could find books on it and buy - are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is a price match (I used it, it works) - are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked at are listed on the store, newest version - is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.
- se32point1 6y ago
  If you mean this, https://www.amazon.com/b?node=17717476011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=17717476011, the Kobo indeed has many of those features as of now. Supports searching a Dictionary, Wikipedia, Google, and adding notes. There are translations in the Dictionary, but the "Word Wise" feature does not exist, but I can live without that. I can understand some who wouldn't, though.
  - jwiley 6y ago
    I was thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle) ...roughly the same thing, or maybe the same thing under different branding.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  How is chrome equivalent to kindle? It's open source, it doesn't have a special format, you can visit any website with it.
acabal 6y ago
Calibre was always much better at generating Kindle-compatible books than Kindlegen ever was. We use Calibre in our posix-based build chain at Standard Ebooks. The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-bar world of ereaders).
- TavsiE9s 6y ago
  Alright then, question time: I've looked into Kobo for my wife, who predominantly reads books in Spanish. Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter where I am physically located in the world?
  - dddw 6y ago
    Https://www.kobo.com/es ?
    - TavsiE9s 6y ago
      That's unfortunately the one we've already tried. For whatever reasons we can't seem to actually download the books that were purchased.
      - solstice 6y ago
        Are you sure? They do obscure the direct download links on the German kobo site (kobobooks.de), apparently preferring people to use their e-readers sync functionality. But last i checked I was able to download the kepub files after some browsing around in the web interface. I can't verify this now as the site isn't loading for some reason
        solstice 6y ago
dstaley 6y ago
For what it's worth, Kindle Previewer 3 runs without issue under Wine (well, at least the CLI). I use it to convert epub files to KFX to add to my Kindle.
dr-detroit 6y ago
the lawyers at my company would eat you alive for using an OS that has systemd
Animats 6y ago
How are you supposed to generate Kindle-format content on AWS, then?
alpineidyll3 6y ago
Anyone looking for a Kindle replacement the Boox line of products are excellent alternatives.
- BHSPitMonkey 6y ago
  That's the one from China that uses Linux without complying with the GPL, right? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chinese_company_will_not_share_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...
deleted 6y ago
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xvilka 6y ago
> EPUB requires readers to support the HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, SVG formats, making EPUB readers use the same technology as web browsers. I wish people would develop cleaner FB3 (Fiction Book) rather than messy and overcomplicated ePub.
ggm 6y ago
I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad. This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No, there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences. Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop, the motivations to fix this here, are mixed. As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome. I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable. Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad. Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?
  - ggm 6y ago
    Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press.. No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also intrude adverts into the flow...
    - rumanator 6y ago
      > Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press.. That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful. Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store. My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon launched Kindle.
nickcotter 6y ago
Will this affect services like Crofflr, or do they use a different mechanism?
- mzehrer 6y ago
  [crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to switch to calibre based tooling.
jordache 6y ago
i hate how kindle doesn't support adobe DRM, which many libraries use for lending out ebooks.

225 points by umvi 6y ago

monadic2 6y ago

They still read epub, right? Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.

mikece 6y ago
Mobi, ePub, and MS Word (not sure how good Libre Office is at this though) were all acceptable formats last time I checked.
turtlebits 6y ago
Nope, IIRC, the only open ebook format supported is mobi. Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).
- liability 6y ago
  They also load PDFs and plain text files (IIRC) though those are not quite 'eBook formats.'
  - monadic2 6y ago
    I've personally found the pdf on kindle experience to be absolutely frustrating but YMMV I'm sure.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Ack you're right... same conclusion though.
ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
>They still read epub, right? No, and they never did.
kayodelycaon 6y ago
No. A lot of people use Calibre to convert epubs to mobi before loading them on their kindles.

bluedays 6y ago

Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.

deleted 6y ago
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mikece 6y ago
Are there jailbreaks and/or custom ROMs for Kindles? It's a nice little device; would be a lot nicer without it constantly phoning home to Amazon.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  You can stick koreader on them. Of course you'll have to go through the trouble of de-DRMing your content, but it's not that hard using Calibre. At that point you should just buy a Kobo forma, which is much nicer hardware.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Yes! Jailbreak thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186645 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186645 (Note that in some cases it requires opening the plastic and ordering some cable off of Amazon.) The only custom ROM I know about that supports Kindle devices is KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader). I don't like its interface one bit, but feature-wise it gets the job done just fine. There's also Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato https://github.com/baskerville/plato) for Kobo devices, though KOReader works there as well. In my experience jailbreaking a Kobo device is much less painful.
  - se32point1 6y ago
    I've done it before on a really old Kindle... KOReader isn't precisely an alternate firmware. It's just a piece of software you run on the Kindle in place of the default, and it does have its advantages, at least on my old Kindle: for example, I could enable Night Mode and read ePubs. It also supported connecting to Calibre wirelessly which was also convenient-ish (Calibre still eats up MIME types and I was very happy on the day I could finally uninstall it, and KOReader doesn't support using USB to transfer without first stopping KOReader). Other than that, maybe it's because my Kindle was aging, but the battery life seemed to worsen dramatically after jailbreaking, and I had to downgrade to an older firwmare in order to jailbreak it. The Kindle was getting old and I bought a Kobo anyway (in part because I'm tired of contributing to Amazon's empire, and further propelled by the fact that it supports Adobe DRM'ed ePubs [and well, while I don't like DRM, it's nice to be able to have the option of using my local library's ebooks]). I'd think you're correct about the Kobo's jailbreaking (haven't tried it myself, but I do intend on doing it in the future, and perhaps developing software for it), but I know already it's much, much easier to customize, thanks to the wonderful hidden folder with the Kobo eReader.conf file, where you can, for example, set the power button to screenshot (which disables the power button, but I have an aftermarket magnetic sleep cover, so this isn't an issue).

mikece 6y ago

Sigil still seems like a perfectly valid option for creating and editing ebooks on Linux (and macOS and Windows): https://sigil-ebook.com/about/ https://sigil-ebook.com/about/

teraflop 6y ago
Sigil only supports creating ePub files, which Kindles can't natively read. The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.
- liability 6y ago
  > kindlegen Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.
    - liability 6y ago
      That's fair. I'd probably put more effort into figuring it out if I thought I needed more features than `ebook-convert` exposes.
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    I've used it successfully. "Good" is probably more enthusiasm than I would use to describe it, but it was adequate.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    I've used both at times but kindlegen sometimes failed to convert books correctly whereas calibre did not, so at least anecdotally calibre seemed better.

inetsee 6y ago

The linked page doesn't actually say that Linux is no longer supported. You need to go to the Previewer Product page https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765... then scroll down to the System Requirements, where it says "Windows 8.1 or later, Intel Mac OSX 10.13 or later".

acidburnNSA 6y ago

Oh dang. I used this to publish my first (and only) eBook as the final chain in my Sphinx based workflow. It was fun to publish a book on Amazon. I'm not sure I would have tried it if the Linux tooling hadn't been there.

swiley 6y ago

Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.

mdoms 6y ago
Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?
- snazz 6y ago
  Yeah, this decision makes business sense for Amazon. Updating a Linux client is a nice gesture but affects a very small parentage of desktop users.
  - peterdemin 6y ago
    That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but multibillion corporation cuts it for “business sense”.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      It's precisely because the enthusiasts are doing it for free that makes it viable. When a corporation manages Linux software, even if the software is freely available, they're paying for support time -- and if they're developing the software, as in this case, the development time.
      - danilocesar 6y ago
        exactly! Another way to see it: engineering is the easy/cheap part. Testing, supporting, maintaining and marketing are way more expensive, and those are long-term expenses. The enthusiast usually thinks about the engineering bits, and when he's done with it he's done with it. Enterprise software is not like that - or shouldn't be :)
    - mdoms 6y ago

rriepe 6y ago

Wow, huge bummer. This is how I generated and edited my Kindle book... not sure what to do now.

toyg 6y ago
Generate ePub and convert using something like Calibre's ebook-convert? At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
- liability 6y ago
  > At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...? That's what epubs are, plain old zip files with some xhtml, CSS, etc. You can unzip them using standard utilities. Mobi files aren't zips, but the premise is roughly the same and conversion between the two is usually seamless.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    It's almost, but not quite "plain". You have to make sure that the mimetype file is the very first file in the zip, and that the mimetype file is uncompressed. Otherwise the epub will fail validation and will not work on many readers. So yeah, you can unzip them with any standard zip utility, but zipping them back up requires some care.
vetinari 6y ago
If you have your copy of kindlegen, it will continue to work - it is a 32-bit statically linked binary, so as long as your kernel supports 32-bit processes and 32-bit ELF files, you are good to go. That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it didn't run on Catalina at all.
- rriepe 6y ago
  Ironically I've just made a Mac-to-Linux workflow change. I can probably still figure something out with another machine and Windows. Thanks for the tip though.

leephillips 6y ago

Kindle can handle PDF (and plain text) natively. If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. Also, it’s the only reasonable choice if your book has math or anything else typographically challenging.

Arainach 6y ago
>offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format. [[CITATION NEEDED]] PDFs still don't reflow when changing the text size.
liability 6y ago
> If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW format That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own personal use, not for distribution.)
- leephillips 6y ago
  You and the other reply are correct about font sizes. I thought it was obvious that, if you are generating different files for different screen sizes, you can also generate large-type versions. This can all be automated. Why bother? Because the usual format for Kindle books looks bad, like webpages. And, as I said, forget about math, etc.
  - liability 6y ago
    Having two font settings to choose from is a degraded user experience. You're also missing the margin and line spacing settings, as well as font style. Also TTS sucks with PDFs but works excellent with reflowable formats (this one is important to me personally.) > the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages. Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided. > math This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than offering dozens of PDF variations.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

Personally I use Send to Kindle for sending ebooks (which I get from Humble Bundle from time to time) to my Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by email with this service. Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin.

k1m 6y ago
> Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle with the appropriate plugin. That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send documents to the device). I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet provide. More info on recent changes here: https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-changes.html https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-chang...

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

I'm not sure how much of a big deal this is in practice. Amazon's KindleGen tool was never open source, and Kindle-specific book formats are proprietary. And, while this is admittedly anecdotal, I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that Linux users tend toward the, hmm, opinionated when it comes to certain things, licensing chief among them. Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those workflows are still available.

Turing_Machine 6y ago
Yeah, you can upload an epub to Amazon's Kindle publishing portal, and it will convert it and provide a download link for the converted version (if you want to double-check it before hitting "Publish" -- recommended).

jonhohle 6y ago

A fun `kindlegen` story from my past: When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go, the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut for launch. Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however, those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team (justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file (e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to would need to change. Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially, their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted several months to implement the feature. Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references, and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively. This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now. It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow, but the tide will continue. ¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.

jwiley 6y ago

Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox: - supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR - no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me - is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes, its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably shrinking - could it be sold? Possibly: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten-sell-kobo https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-rakuten... - is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes with their support - does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could find books on it and buy - are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is a price match (I used it, it works) - are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked at are listed on the store, newest version - is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.

se32point1 6y ago
If you mean this, https://www.amazon.com/b?node=17717476011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=17717476011, the Kobo indeed has many of those features as of now. Supports searching a Dictionary, Wikipedia, Google, and adding notes. There are translations in the Dictionary, but the "Word Wise" feature does not exist, but I can live without that. I can understand some who wouldn't, though.
- jwiley 6y ago
  I was thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle) ...roughly the same thing, or maybe the same thing under different branding.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
How is chrome equivalent to kindle? It's open source, it doesn't have a special format, you can visit any website with it.

acabal 6y ago

Calibre was always much better at generating Kindle-compatible books than Kindlegen ever was. We use Calibre in our posix-based build chain at Standard Ebooks. The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-bar world of ereaders).

TavsiE9s 6y ago
Alright then, question time: I've looked into Kobo for my wife, who predominantly reads books in Spanish. Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter where I am physically located in the world?
- dddw 6y ago
  Https://www.kobo.com/es ?
  - TavsiE9s 6y ago
    That's unfortunately the one we've already tried. For whatever reasons we can't seem to actually download the books that were purchased.
    - solstice 6y ago
      Are you sure? They do obscure the direct download links on the German kobo site (kobobooks.de), apparently preferring people to use their e-readers sync functionality. But last i checked I was able to download the kepub files after some browsing around in the web interface. I can't verify this now as the site isn't loading for some reason
      - solstice 6y ago

dstaley 6y ago

For what it's worth, Kindle Previewer 3 runs without issue under Wine (well, at least the CLI). I use it to convert epub files to KFX to add to my Kindle.

dr-detroit 6y ago

the lawyers at my company would eat you alive for using an OS that has systemd

Animats 6y ago

How are you supposed to generate Kindle-format content on AWS, then?

alpineidyll3 6y ago

Anyone looking for a Kindle replacement the Boox line of products are excellent alternatives.

BHSPitMonkey 6y ago
That's the one from China that uses Linux without complying with the GPL, right? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chinese_company_will_not_share_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

xvilka 6y ago

> EPUB requires readers to support the HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, SVG formats, making EPUB readers use the same technology as web browsers. I wish people would develop cleaner FB3 (Fiction Book) rather than messy and overcomplicated ePub.

ggm 6y ago

I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad. This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No, there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences. Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop, the motivations to fix this here, are mixed. As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome. I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable. Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.

rumanator 6y ago
> I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually pretty bad. Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?
- ggm 6y ago
  Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press.. No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also intrude adverts into the flow...
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press.. That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful. Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store. My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon launched Kindle.

nickcotter 6y ago

Will this affect services like Crofflr, or do they use a different mechanism?

mzehrer 6y ago
[crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to switch to calibre based tooling.

jordache 6y ago

i hate how kindle doesn't support adobe DRM, which many libraries use for lending out ebooks.