
Kindle Format 8: Announcing HTML5 Support in Kindle Format 8 - mikecane
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000729511
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DanielBMarkham
I'm currently hand-coding my first book in EPUB, and I've written a lot of
websites, and worked with all kinds of mixed-mode content.

Do we really need HTML5 support? Isn't the purpose of Kindle to be a book?

Ok, I can grok colors. I might even go for interactive charts. But where does
this stop? As a consumer, I would like my static content delivered in a
separate device in a format approaching paper. My dynamic content I consume
from a different device. One of the reasons is that various forms of content
are more engaging (read addictive) than others, so by separating them I can
budget my time. I don't think anything of spending 5 hours with a Kindle on
the weekend _because it's a book_. If I spent that same time playing Angry
Birds on my Android I'd know something is out of whack.

Does everything have to be an all-purpose display device? I kind of liked the
Kindle because it was doing just the one thing. I'm not sure I understand why
the format has to be updated so much.

EDIT: I'm also curious as to how this affects all the other readers out there.
In E-Reader world, we live way back in the dark ages where every device is
funky. Does this add more to the funkiness of trying to cross-deploy? Was
there something so wrong with Keep it Simple, Stupid? It's text, for goodness
sake. It's a _book_. I know I sound like grumpy-old-guy, but hell guys, ya
think we could manage one format for displaying the world's oldest persistent
communications format -- simple text -- without too many revisions?

~~~
kkowalczyk
You might be right in abstract but in the real world technical decisions are
often made by choosing the lesser of several evils.

Pure text is not good enough for many kinds of books - you need to at least
support images (for cookbooks, children books, travel guides etc.),
monospaced, bold, italic fonts (for programming books), vector graphics (for
illustrations in technical books that will good at every dpi) etc.

There's no strictly ebook format that gives you that so you can either spend
engineering resources trying to define and implement a new, non-trivial ebook
format from scratch, with non-insignificant possibility of getting something
wrong.

Or you can re-use the most wide spread document format in existence. A format
that gives you everything you might ever want, has evolved over more than a
decade, is tried and tested and works and is implemented on every platform
imaginable and has open-source implementation that everyone can re-use.

HTML5 is the lesser of any other evil you can come up with as a new format for
ebooks. Amazon made the right decision.

~~~
r00fus
Wait, doesn't PDF support all of the above? Why require HTML rendering? All
sorts of issues arise since HTML is markup based and not layout based like PDF
or ePub...

~~~
yangyang
As far as I know, PDFs don't reflow text. They're only suitable for a fixed
screen size.

~~~
mikecane
There's reflowable PDF but when there are things like illustrations and
tables, it gets really ugly and really useless really fast.

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troymc
The rest of the comments here are suggesting that Kindle Format 8, in adding
support for HTML5 and SVG, is adding a lot.

Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet!

On October 11, the IDPF membership unanimously voted to elevate EPUB 3.0 to a
final IDPF Recommended Specification. And what's in EPUB 3.0?

XHTML 5, SVG 1.1, CSS 2.1 and 3, JavaScript, TrueType fonts, WOFF fonts,
SSML/PLS/CSS3 Speech, SMIL 3, RDF vocabularies, MathML, and more...

Compared to EPUB 3.0 (parts of which are already supported by Apple's iBooks
app), Kindle Format 8 is behind the times.

~~~
shadowsun7
It'll take at least a year (maybe two) to ship EPUB3.0-ready devices. A large-
ish, ongoing concern is with scripting. How would the security model for that
look like?

Granted, Apple's recently gotten involved in the EPUB3 working group, and that
may force some pressure on the group to ship. But the spec is rather vague in
some areas, and I expect it to take some time to hash out.

I'd say that KF8 is equivalent to EPUB2. Maybe a wee bit better. But my fear
is that it's good enough to warrant switching over from EPUB.

~~~
troymc
Does KF8 support JavaScript? I don't see why allowing scripting in an e-reader
app is any different from allowing it in a web browser app.

I also don't understand why you think it'll take so long to ship an
EPUB3.0-ready device. The current iBooks app already allows for some embedded
JavaScript (which only came with EPUB 3.0). Kobo says they'll have an e-reader
device that supports EPUP 3.0 in the next 3-6 months:
[http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/five-tablet-trends-
sign...](http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/five-tablet-trends-signaled-by-
the-new-kobo-vox/)

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lazerwalker
From the FAQ: "Will KF8 capabilities be available on all Kindle devices? A:
Kindle Fire is the first Kindle device to support KF8 - in the coming months
we will roll out KF8 to our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices as well as
our free Kindle reading apps."

This implies that older Kindles won't get support for this. If that's true,
Amazon's going to either get a bunch of pissed-off users or a shiny new format
that nobody uses.

Part of what I love about the Kindle is that it's previously given off an aura
of being above the "gotta update to the new model!" consumer frenzy that other
portable electronics embody.

~~~
fpgeek
Older-Kindle users may be pissed off, but most of them have enough invested in
the platform that hey aren't going anywhere. And the cheaper Kindle Basic
(which should support the new format) is at least an olive branch on this
front.

For Amazon, the more important thing to do is to address users of the reading
apps, since those are the users who can more easily switch to an alternative
(even if only for new purchases). And they're doing that.

~~~
mikecane
When Sony dumped its BroadBand eBook (BBeB) format, it transparently replaced
books in that format with ePub for everyone who bought books in that other
format. I think Amazon will do the same as books are moved to the new format.
As Amazon keeps saying, your books exist on your bookshelf and can be re-
downloaded any time. No big deal to switch the formats. For those with older
Kindles, they could warn them the new format won't work. Since every Kindle
has to be registered with Amazon, they know who has which generation of
device.

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mwsherman
Traditional typesetting is hard and not very amenable to reflow (as in,
variable page sizes). The HTML/CSS world has worked a lot of this out.

(Though I am quite ignorant of the MOBI format that is being replaced.)

This also bodes well for taking web pages offline and onto dedicated reading
devices, a la Instapaper.

~~~
mcpherrinm
Mobi is an unholy mess of HTML-inspired markup. I don't think anything else
uses it, and it was designed to be rendered on incredibly constrained hardware
that just doesn't exist anymore. It's OK to use a few megabytes of RAM to
render a document now.

Using straight-up HTML5 lets them dump a bunch of code for proprietary
rendering engines, I suspect. And it simplifies the Kindle fire and web-based
/ PC readers, where they can just embed an HTML renderer.

(Disclaimer: While I'm a former Amazon employee, I didn't work on or with
Kindle. As a current Mozilla employee, I think HTML5 is pretty nice.).

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evanjacobs
This is a surprising decision. I think most people were expecting Amazon to
move away from Mobi but they probably expected Amazon to adopt EPUB especially
as EPUB 3.0 is near release.

~~~
dutom
Epub would've been nice for us, but this makes more business sense.

The Kindle devices are cheap & low margin; Amazon's profit is from the
content. They've got a customer mindshare majority (What's an ereader? Oh, you
mean a Kindle), and a large author base. Why would they open up their devices
to competing publishers?

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mrpollo
The list of supported HTML tags an CSS features is here (found inside article)
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_357613442...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_357613442_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000729901&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_r=1WJ1DFG4J5R78DGH92J4&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_p=1321300302&pf_rd_i=1000729511)

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aidenn0
Darn! Now I'm not going to be able to convert kindle books to run on my sony
reader. Guess I'll have to buy my books elsewhere.

~~~
mikecane
You don't know that yet. The scripters and Calibre author will figure it all
out.

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Tichy
No scripting (JavaScript?) I suppose?

