Hey guys,
First time I've written to this list, but I figured now was just as good a time as any other. I'm a collections management intern at the Archive.
>Last I remembered, the "Kindle" format was identical to the MobiPocket ".mobi"
format,
Yep, this is correct. Amazon added a few extra headers to the file format, but the kindle can read .mobi files with out the .azw headers.
>My suspicion is that the Archive.org people simply grabbed KindleGen, or a
similar command-line program, and did a mass conversion of all their ePubs to
Kindle. As an alternative, a more sophisticated interface could generate the
Kindle pubs on demand when a Kindle version did not already exist ... or even
in every case if they have more processing power than disk space.
Yep, this is mostly the case. Unless someone sends us a .mobi when they upload an item, we dynamically generate one from the epub at each request time.
>Are there any publications on
archive.org where there is a Kindle version but
no ePub?
We do not currently generate epubs from mobis, so if someone uploads ONLY a .mobi file, that will be the only format it's available in. The preferred way of uploading a book is as a zip or tar of tiffs or jpegs, because then we can derive them into everything. You can see which formats will derive into what on this page:
http://www.archive.org/help/derivatives.php
>Are there any Kindle versions available which are more "refined" than their
ePub counterparts?
Yes, if someone uploads a custom-made mobi with their item, that one will be served instead of a kindlegen conversion.
>Are the new Kindles capable of reading ePub (or HTML?) files directly?
As far as we know from our contact at Amazon, no. (This is also confirmed by the product website)
Let me know if you have any more questions!
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Lee Passey
<lee@novomail.net> wrote:
On Wed, September 28, 2011 10:10 am, Jim Adcock wrote:
[snip]
> Just double-checking, the "Kindle" books on
archive.org are not encrypted,
> which is a good thing, and how it should be, so users can use them for other
> than just Kindles.
format, which was just a dumbed-down ePub using a different compression
format. (Somewhere in this mess I have the source for a program I wrote that
decompresses the ".mobi" format into its component parts...) Part of the
ePub-to-mobi conversion process is to convert styles, both inline and CSS,
into regular HTML tags, as MobiPocket didn't recognize styles in any form.
My suspicion is that the Archive.org people simply grabbed KindleGen, or a
similar command-line program, and did a mass conversion of all their ePubs to
Kindle. As an alternative, a more sophisticated interface could generate the
Kindle pubs on demand when a Kindle version did not already exist ... or even
in every case if they have more processing power than disk space.
So for me, this raises the interesting (although in no way important) questions:
Are there any publications on archive.org where there is a Kindle version but
no ePub?
Are there any Kindle versions available which are more "refined" than their
ePub counterparts?
Are the new Kindles capable of reading ePub (or HTML?) files directly?
Inquiring minds want to know ...