[publican-list] Fwd: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle

[David Jorm]

"On July 17, 2009, Amazon.com withdrew certain Kindle titles, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, from sale, refunded the cost to those who had purchased them, and remotely deleted these titles from purchasers' devices after discovering that the publisher lacked rights to publish the titles in question."

Source: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/

Just sayin'...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lana Brindley" <lbrindle at redhat.com>
To: "publican" <publican-list at redhat.com>
Cc: "Will Benton" <willb at redhat.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2010 6:04:33 PM GMT +10:00 Brisbane
Subject: [publican-list] Fwd: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle

Forwarding to the Publican ML for further discussion.

L

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:05:19 -0500
From: Will Benton <willb at redhat.com>
To: mrg-grid-internal at redhat.com

Sorry, I forgot to attach the converted-document screenshots from my
Kindle.  They're on this message.

On 10/08/2010 09:03 PM, Will Benton wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about reading our documentation on the Kindle for a
> while and, after talking with William about it on IRC today, decided to
> do something about it. I'm sending out a note about my experience in
> case it's generally useful.
>
> Of course, the PDFs we distribute are fine on the Kindle, but I
> suspected that a native ebook format might be more successful on the
> smaller screen of the third-generation Kindle. The epub files we
> distribute are fine for many ebook readers; they look pretty good in
> Stanza on the iPhone, for example (see stanza-epub-title-page.PNG and
> stanza-epub-typefaces.PNG). Unfortunately, the Kindle cannot natively
> display epub files.
>
> I tried a few options:
>
> 1. converting .epub files to Kindle ebooks using Amazon's free-beer
> kindlegen application. This failed due to some bogus or missing metadata
> in the table of contents for our epub docs.
>
> 2. emailing the .epub files to my @kindle.com email address and hoping
> that Amazon would automatically convert them for me. This also failed;
> Amazon's automatic converter doesn't handle epub files.
>
> 3. using the open-source Calibre application to convert .epub to .mobi
> or .azw. This also failed, although it did so while cheerfully (but
> hideously, as only a Java GUI application with custom icons can do)
> giving the impression that it had actually converted the files.
> Obviously, YMMV here if you can get it to work.
>
> 4. using the free-beer desktop version of Stanza to convert the files to
> .azw or .mobi (I tried both). This actually resulted in something I
> could use on the Kindle, but it stripped all but the barest of
> formatting (including all fonts), which makes for pretty unpleasant
> reading. (See kindle1.gif and kindle2.gif)
>
> None of these turned out to be particularly satisfactory. It is possible
> to produce decent .mobi files that respect technical-documentation
> conventions (the DRM-free .mobi ebooks from O'Reilly and the Pragmatic
> Programmers are great on Kindle); I'm just not sure how to do it.
> Perhaps there's a decent tool that goes straight from DocBook to mobi?
>
>
>
> best,
> wb
>


-- 
William C. Benton <willb at redhat.com>
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat MRG


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