• Kindle document handling

    Aug 03.09 | Learn   

    Good news/bad news/lessons learned in the process of transferring documents to my new Kindle.

    • Bad news first — copy protected e-books purchased through other stores, in my case eReader.com can’t really be copied to the Kindle.  I did find some Python scripts that claim to be able to handle the conversion, but I gave up after an hour of frustration. Kind of a drag, and if I had more than this one book I might try harder.  But as I expected taking an existing purchased library and expecting it to convert to Kindle doesn’t look like a reality for the average user.
    • Good news is that I had great success sending an Educause ECAR pdf file via the Kindle on-line email conversion tool.  It cost me $0.15, but was pretty painless.  These PDFs are mostly text, and that converted fine.  There was one table that suffered in the conversion — the info was there but the format was gone.  Overall I was happy, and will use it again for ECAR PDF documents.  It is nice to be environmentally responsible and save the paper I usually use to read these during my commute.
    • But $0.15 per book is still paying — so I gave Auto Kindle a try.  On an HTML file of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream it worked well.  I had mixed success with some full-length book PDFs in my personal library.  Both converted after a fashion, but not in a really readable fashion.  I think this is more the short-comings in the Kindle support for PDF, rather than a fault with auto-kindle.

    So my impression — the Kindle needs support for PDFs and a conversion utility for books purchased from other sources.

    Auto Kindle eBook Converter | Get Auto Kindle eBook Converter at SourceForge.net

    This project was originally a quick and dirty method for me to convert my ebook collection in various formats to a kindle compatible format without worrying about the ebook source type. It takes PDF, Lit, and HTML files and converts them to .mobi.

    How to hack your Amazon Kindle to read all your ebooks and documents including .pdf, .doc, .xls, chm, .lit, etc.. | Pack Rat Studios

    Enter Igor Skochinsky. Igor has written a script that allows you to convert your encrypted Mobi ebooks to the native Kindle .azw format. It turns out that the .azw format is based on the Mobi format and that all that is needed to allow you to read Mobi encrypted ebooks is a few changes to the header information on the Mobi file to turn it into a .azw.

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    • Author: Randy

    In my day job I serve as Information Technology Director for the Yale School of Drama. Otherwise I garden, play guitar, build stuff out of wood, take photos, play around with technology and have been blogging since 2003.

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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!

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