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.
Last I remembered, the "Kindle" format was identical to the MobiPocket ".mobi" 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 ...