Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?
Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
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Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#22Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?
Yeah, this decision makes business sense for Amazon. Updating a Linux client is a nice gesture but affects a very small parentage of desktop users.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#23They still read epub, right? Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.
Nope, IIRC, the only open ebook format supported is mobi. Never used Kindlegen though, Calibre works great for me. (Although I have never authored an ebook).
They also load PDFs and plain text files (IIRC) though those are not quite 'eBook formats.'
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#24Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.
Are there jailbreaks and/or custom ROMs for Kindles? It's a nice little device; would be a lot nicer without it constantly phoning home to Amazon.
You can stick koreader on them. Of course you'll have to go through the trouble of de-DRMing your content, but it's not that hard using Calibre. At that point you should just buy a Kobo forma, which is much nicer hardware.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#25Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.
It's literally USB mass storage, and you plop files on there. What isn't working for you?
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#26Wow, huge bummer. This is how I generated and edited my Kindle book... not sure what to do now.
Generate ePub and convert using something like Calibre's ebook-convert?
At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#27Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
I'm under the impression publishers can send epubs to Amazon and have Amazon do the conversion. Alternatively send them a regular mobi instead of Amazon's spiced up mobi derivative (awz3 or whatever they're at now.)
At least that's how it used to be years ago. My experience here is a few years out of date.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#28Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform? That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.
What's wrong with that? Aren't most people that aren't tech savvy using Windows or Mac?
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#29Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret buying the device.
Are there jailbreaks and/or custom ROMs for Kindles? It's a nice little device; would be a lot nicer without it constantly phoning home to Amazon.
Yes! Jailbreak thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186645 (Note that in some cases it requires opening the plastic and ordering some cable off of Amazon.)
The only custom ROM I know about that supports Kindle devices is KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader). I don't like its interface one bit, but feature-wise it gets the job done just fine.
There's also Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato) for Kobo devices, though KOReader works there as well. In my experience jailbreaking a Kobo device is much less painful.