They still read epub, right? Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.
No. A lot of people use Calibre to convert epubs to mobi before loading them on their kindles.
Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#32Haven'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?
I just recently bought a Kindle, and this has not been my experience. For whatever reason, perhaps something I am doing wrong, it is not detected as a hard drive by my system.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but multibillion corporation cuts it for “business sense”.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally USB mass storage, and you plop files on there. What isn't working for you?
I just recently bought a Kindle, and this has not been my experience. For whatever reason, perhaps something I am doing wrong, it is not detected as a hard drive by my system.
Have you tried doing a hard restart? Sometimes my kindle gets stuck and needs a reboot, especially if it has been left alone for a while.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#35Ew. 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?
From past experience with desktop/client apps, the number of Linux users was under 1%.
They were a minority, but a very vocal one.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigil only supports creating ePub files, which Kindles can't natively read. The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.
> kindlegen Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigil only supports creating ePub files, which Kindles can't natively read. The Amazon tool that was removed, "kindlegen", was the officially supported way of converting ePub into the Kindle's native AZW format.
> kindlegen Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
I've used it successfully. "Good" is probably more enthusiasm than I would use to describe it, but it was adequate.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#38Wow, 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...?
> At the end of the day, isn't an ebook basically a fancy zip with some markup inside...?
That's what epubs are, plain old zip files with some xhtml, CSS, etc. You can unzip them using standard utilities. Mobi files aren't zips, but the premise is roughly the same and conversion between the two is usually seamless.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's literally USB mass storage, and you plop files on there. What isn't working for you?
I just recently bought a Kindle, and this has not been my experience. For whatever reason, perhaps something I am doing wrong, it is not detected as a hard drive by my system.
Odd. I've never had this issue -- plug it in and the mass storage shows up. My platform is Linux, but this shouldn't make a difference.
What I have seen, however, are plenty of micro USB cables which do not have the data lines connected. They are intended to be used for charging only and have +5V and Ground wires only.
Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> kindlegen Was this tool ever any good? I've always used the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that ships with Calibre. (Calibre's GUI is something I don't really like, it seems featureful but also a mess.)
Fwiw I like Calibre's UI. It harkens back to an older era of software design in which every imaginable use case is supported and menus are gigantic lists of features.
That's fair. I'd probably put more effort into figuring it out if I thought I needed more features than `ebook-convert` exposes.