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Don't forget to backup your marks and highlights also. I made that mistake once, and then lost my Kindle. Lost years worth of highlights and notes, so now I set up a bash script to automatically sync them to a Git repo when my Kindle is plugged into my laptop.
Don't forget to backup your marks and highlights also. I made that mistake once, and then lost my Kindle. Lost years worth of highlights and notes, so now I set up a bash script to automatically sync them to a Git repo when my Kindle is plugged into my laptop.
Your bookmarks and highlights are synced to the cloud. You should be able to read them online on: http://read.amazon.com/notebook From the kindle you can also export all the highlights of a book to your email. It's a lot better to read it on your email. The kindle device reader note reading experience is subpar.
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I had no idea that an EPUB file was embedded in the weird Amazon formats. I mostly agree that you want to avoid "transcoding" an EPUB. But the formatting on some official EPUBs is so bad that I like to use readers that can override the built-in formatting. I like to choose the font, spacing, hyphenation, and justification myself. (Full justification and hyphenation are my bugbears--I think they are never appropriate…
There isn't an EPUB "embedded" in Kindle formats. The Kindle format is based on the pre-Kindle Mobipocket format (that's why unDRMed Kindle books often have an extension of .mobi). EPUB didn't even exist when this format was created. Making an EPUB (or any other format) from a Kindle book involves converting, which is always going to introduce changes in formatting. People can argue that one program or another does a…
- MobiPocket and early Kindle version 7 or less ebooks are unpacked to the original html 3.2 and images folder that can then be edited and reprocessed by MobiPocketCreator.
- Kindle Print Replica ebook are unpacked to the original PDF and any associated images.
- Kindle KF8 only ebooks (.azw3) are unpacked into an epub-like structure that may or may not be a fully valid epub depending on if a fully valid epub was originally provided to kindlegen as input. NOTE: The generated epub should be validated using an epub validator and should changes be needed, it should load properly into Sigil and Calibre either of which can be used to edit the result to create a fully valid epub.
- Newer Kindle ebooks which have both KF8 and older versions inside are unpacked into two different parts: the first being the older MobiPocket format ebook parts and the second being an epub-like structure that can be edited using Sigil
I've downloaded all my books but I'm holding off cracking the DRM until I need to.
Last time I checked, there was no crack for Amazon's latest version of their DRM (KF8 files). A workaround exists where you get Amazon to wrap the content in the old DRM, but then you lose all the typography improvements in the KF8 file.
What are folks using for Audible? Open Audible? It wasn't pulling my library correctly last time I tried.
OpenAudible looks like a nice tool that'll automate all of these steps for you.
I got my first kindle in 2010 and bounced over to Barnes & Noble for a while with a Nook but then came back to the Amazon ecosystem. I've bought hundreds of books over the years.
But just like paper books there are a lot of books that I read once and never look at again. They aren't priceless treasured objects for me.
The thing with Amazon.. people complain a lot, but their ecosystem just works the best in the eBook space. I actually find it a lot less annoying than some of the shenanigans with other digital stores like the iTunes store over the years. I haven't tried Kobo but B&N was always a hot mess compared to Amazon. Tons of annoyances in the store & device software that Amazon had right from day 1. And you were paying more for a worse experience.
Sometimes it's just better to pirate the books even if you've paid for them. The formatting and error correction is usually better and they stick to epub and mobi standards. As an aside: I was helping a friend out who owned a Kindle recently and shocked to learn it can't read mobi or epub. Why would anyone buy such a crap e-reader?
Kindle does support mobi, but you have to convert epub files (this can't be done through your Kindle email address' convert ability for some reason).
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I've heard people complain about Calibre's EPUB conversion utility, but I've never seen anyone do a deep-dive to explain exactly why it's bad. Is it comparable to the HTML-soup that Microsoft Word spits out when you export a Word doc to HTML? FWIW, I still heed those warnings, and so I still hold on to the de-DRM'd AZW file even after I convert it to EPUB.
I don't know why it's bad, but I know the end result is poorly laid out. It's always super obvious I'm reading something passed through calibre conversion, because accent marks will be missing, intra chapter breaks will be missing, punctuation is messed up, etc.
You need to download old Kindle app where it's possible.