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

[Misty Stanley-Jones]

And Bezos' response to that: http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-amazon-handled-recent-illegal-book.html


----- "David Jorm" <djorm at redhat.com> wrote:

> From: "David Jorm" <djorm at redhat.com>
> To: "Publican discussions" <publican-list at redhat.com>
> Cc: "Will Benton" <willb at redhat.com>
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 1:51:24 PM GMT +10:00 Brisbane
> Subject: Re: [publican-list] Fwd: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle
>
> "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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-- 
Misty Stanley-Jones
Content Author, ECS Brisbane
Ph: +61 7 3514 8105
RHCT #60501081553354
Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum.