[publican-list] Fwd: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle

[Lana Brindley]

Forwarding to the Publican ML for further discussion.

L

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: reading our docs on the Kindle
Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:05:19 -0500
From: Will Benton <willb at redhat.com>
To: mrg-grid-internal at redhat.com

Sorry, I forgot to attach the converted-document screenshots from my
Kindle.  They're on this message.

On 10/08/2010 09:03 PM, Will Benton wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about reading our documentation on the Kindle for a
> while and, after talking with William about it on IRC today, decided to
> do something about it. I'm sending out a note about my experience in
> case it's generally useful.
>
> Of course, the PDFs we distribute are fine on the Kindle, but I
> suspected that a native ebook format might be more successful on the
> smaller screen of the third-generation Kindle. The epub files we
> distribute are fine for many ebook readers; they look pretty good in
> Stanza on the iPhone, for example (see stanza-epub-title-page.PNG and
> stanza-epub-typefaces.PNG). Unfortunately, the Kindle cannot natively
> display epub files.
>
> I tried a few options:
>
> 1. converting .epub files to Kindle ebooks using Amazon's free-beer
> kindlegen application. This failed due to some bogus or missing metadata
> in the table of contents for our epub docs.
>
> 2. emailing the .epub files to my @kindle.com email address and hoping
> that Amazon would automatically convert them for me. This also failed;
> Amazon's automatic converter doesn't handle epub files.
>
> 3. using the open-source Calibre application to convert .epub to .mobi
> or .azw. This also failed, although it did so while cheerfully (but
> hideously, as only a Java GUI application with custom icons can do)
> giving the impression that it had actually converted the files.
> Obviously, YMMV here if you can get it to work.
>
> 4. using the free-beer desktop version of Stanza to convert the files to
> .azw or .mobi (I tried both). This actually resulted in something I
> could use on the Kindle, but it stripped all but the barest of
> formatting (including all fonts), which makes for pretty unpleasant
> reading. (See kindle1.gif and kindle2.gif)
>
> None of these turned out to be particularly satisfactory. It is possible
> to produce decent .mobi files that respect technical-documentation
> conventions (the DRM-free .mobi ebooks from O'Reilly and the Pragmatic
> Programmers are great on Kindle); I'm just not sure how to do it.
> Perhaps there's a decent tool that goes straight from DocBook to mobi?
>
>
>
> best,
> wb
>


-- 
William C. Benton <willb at redhat.com>
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat MRG

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