
Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks - umvi
https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000765211
======
acabal
Calibre was always much better at generating Kindle-compatible books than
Kindlegen ever was. We use Calibre in our posix-based build chain at Standard
Ebooks.

The Kindle file format is just miserable, and Kindle is basically the IE6 of
ereaders. Anyone who cares about ebooks should get a different device that
supports epub natively. Kobo makes nice devices, supports epub, and uses
Webkit as their renderer (when used with their kepub format, which is not
ideal but is basically a specially-formatted epub so good enough in the low-
bar world of ereaders).

~~~
TavsiE9s
Alright then, question time: I've looked into Kobo for my wife, who
predominantly reads books in Spanish.

Navigating the various offerings seems like a minefield of digital rights and
lockouts. Where would I go to legally buy Spanish language books no matter
where I am physically located in the world?

~~~
anthk
Casa del Libro maybe.

[https://www.casadellibro.com/ebooks](https://www.casadellibro.com/ebooks)

~~~
TavsiE9s
Thanks, will give that a try.

------
jwiley
Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass
over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon
monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox:

\- supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF,
PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR

\- no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me

\- is the company behind Kobo credible, will it be around for a while: yes,
its owned by a credible company, 13.4% e-reader market share, probably
shrinking

\- could it be sold? Possibly: [https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-
readers/will-rakuten...](https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/will-
rakuten-sell-kobo)

\- is there an export path if they go under: its Adobe DRM, so assumably yes
with their support

\- does the store work?: Yes, the interface is reasonable if slow, I could
find books on it and buy

\- are prices comparable: no, Kindle is cheaper in some instances but there is
a price match (I used it, it works)

\- are the books I want on there: yes, ever one of the 5 or so books I looked
at are listed on the store, newest version

\- is the reader comparable to Kindle: yes, same settings I use on devices and
laptop, fonts, brightness, clarity etc all comparable

One thing missing is 'X-Ray', which is neat but not essential technology
Kindle has. Kobo has a book search that is ok, but not as good.

~~~
jmholla
I recently bought a Kobo and it wanted to connect to my WiFi before it would
do anything. I ended up returning it.

~~~
TwoNineFive
I have a Kobo. This is correct -- it won't let you do anything before you
connect it to Wifi.

However, there is a trivial hack to get around this where you connect it to
your computer via USB and manually edit a sqlite database to put in some blank
entries on the registration. There are lots of posts on how to do this online.
After you've done this, it works offline just fine.

------
inetsee
The linked page doesn't actually say that Linux is no longer supported. You
need to go to the Previewer Product page
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261)
then scroll down to the System Requirements, where it says "Windows 8.1 or
later, Intel Mac OSX 10.13 or later".

------
chipotle_coyote
I'm not sure how much of a big deal this is in practice. Amazon's KindleGen
tool was never open source, and Kindle-specific book formats are proprietary.
And, while this is admittedly anecdotal, I don't think I'm going out on a limb
by suggesting that Linux users tend toward the, hmm, _opinionated_ when it
comes to certain things, licensing chief among them.

Dollars to donuts that out of the "Kindle books" generated on Linux, a
substantial chunk were created as ePubs using open tools and either converted
to Mobipocket using Calibre or a similar tool, or just handed off to the
publisher directly and converted on their end to Kindle. All of those
workflows are still available.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yeah, you can upload an epub to Amazon's Kindle publishing portal, and it will
convert it and provide a download link for the converted version (if you want
to double-check it before hitting "Publish" \-- recommended).

------
swiley
Ew. So you need a windows machine/VM just to publish on the platform?

That’s almost iPhone levels of crappy.

~~~
mdoms
Or a Mac. Between them that's, what, 95%+ of the desktop market? More?

~~~
snazz
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.

~~~
peterdemin
That strikes me how enthusiasts can manage Linux software for free, but
multibillion corporation cuts it for “business sense”.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
It's precisely _because_ the enthusiasts are doing it for free that makes it
viable. When a corporation manages Linux software, even if the software is
freely available, they're paying for support time -- and if they're developing
the software, as in this case, the development time.

~~~
danilocesar
exactly! Another way to see it: engineering is the easy/cheap part. Testing,
supporting, maintaining and marketing are way more expensive, and those are
long-term expenses. The enthusiast usually thinks about the engineering bits,
and when he's done with it he's done with it. Enterprise software is not like
that - or shouldn't be :)

------
acidburnNSA
Oh dang. I used this to publish my first (and only) eBook as the final chain
in my Sphinx based workflow. It was fun to publish a book on Amazon. I'm not
sure I would have tried it if the Linux tooling hadn't been there.

------
mikece
Sigil still seems like a perfectly valid option for creating and editing
ebooks on Linux (and macOS and Windows):

[https://sigil-ebook.com/about/](https://sigil-ebook.com/about/)

~~~
teraflop
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.

~~~
liability
> 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.)

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
liability
That's fair. I'd probably put more effort into figuring it out if I thought I
needed more features than `ebook-convert` exposes.

------
dstaley
For what it's worth, Kindle Previewer 3 runs without issue under Wine (well,
at least the CLI). I use it to convert epub files to KFX to add to my Kindle.

------
giancarlostoro
Personally I use Send to Kindle for sending ebooks (which I get from Humble
Bundle from time to time) to my Kindle:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle](https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle)

Though based on some comments here on HN I guess this tool was useful to
authors, but I'm curious if it sends it to the Kindle as-is or converts it to
the respective format. Oddly enough I couldn't send awz3 files to my Kindle by
email with this service.

Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a Kindle
with the appropriate plugin.

~~~
k1m
> Sidenote: TIL You can send articles and wordpress posts / content to a
> Kindle with the appropriate plugin.

That's one of the most useful features of the Kindle for me. As far as I know
only PocketBook devices offer similar functionality (email address to send
documents to the device).

I work on Push to Kindle (a similar service to Amazon's Send to Kindle browser
extension for sending web articles). Have had reports that it works better on
many sites. There's also a Firefox addon for it which Amazon does not yet
provide. More info on recent changes here:
[https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-
chang...](https://blog.fivefilters.org/2020/08/19/push-to-kindle-changes.html)

------
leephillips
Kindle can handle PDF (and plain text) natively. If you format a PDF for the
Kindle screen, offering different files for different size devices, the result
will look better than the reflowable AZW format. Also, it’s the only
reasonable choice if your book has math or anything else typographically
challenging.

~~~
liability
> _If you format a PDF for the Kindle screen, offering different files for
> different size devices, the result will look better than the reflowable AZW
> format_

That's not going to work well unless you can anticipate what font settings the
reader[user] will prefer (e.g. you're generating these PDFs for your own
personal use, not for distribution.)

~~~
leephillips
You and the other reply are correct about font sizes. I thought it was obvious
that, if you are generating different files for different screen sizes, you
can also generate large-type versions. This can all be automated. Why bother?
Because the usual format for Kindle books looks bad, like webpages. And, as I
said, forget about math, etc.

~~~
liability
Having two font settings to choose from is a degraded user experience. You're
also missing the margin and line spacing settings, as well as font style. Also
TTS sucks with PDFs but works excellent with reflowable formats (this one is
important to me personally.)

> _the usual format for [any ebooks] looks [...] like webpages._

Because they basically are, and to most people who use these files, that's a
feature. Attempts to subvert that are misguided.

> _math_

This is legitimately a pain point for ebooks, I agree on this point. However I
think embedding formula as images with alt-text is a better solution than
offering dozens of PDF variations.

~~~
leephillips
What’s TTS?

Poor typography is a degraded user experience. If a Kindle is to be an
electronic replacement for a paper book, it is nice if it also has decent
typesetting, like a real book.

There are tradeoffs. If some things are more important to you, I would
hesitate to accuse you of being “misguided”.

EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if
you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text version
would be trivial.

~~~
liability
Sorry, that's my bad for using an initialism without clarification.

> EDIT: It hit me: text to speech. You are right about this, of course. But if
> you have a system for generating a selection of PDFs, including a text
> version would be trivial.

The problem with plain text is you lose the styling and images. A lot of
people who use text to speech (TTS) still have some vision or even full
vision, and would like to see the pictures or bolded/italic text. If there
were a richer format that included those things but worked well with TTS,
wouldn't that be worth offering for download? And isn't an epub exactly that
sort of format?

Active users of ereader devices predominantly use them to read reflowable
formats. If the aesthetics or functionality of the reflowable experience
offended those users, they probably wouldn't remain users/owners of such a
device for long. I'm sure there are some exceptions.

Offering a PDF, or even many PDFs, is fine. Some people prefer PDFs and their
opinion is no less valid the preference for reflowable formats.

In my opinion, a reflowable format should always be offered to those who want
it, but certainly not forced on everybody. I think authors like Douglas R.
Hofstadter who _insist_ on strict fixed formatting are within their rights to
do so, but are misguided. I own a paperback copy of how book; I wish I could
_also_ own an epubs copy, but unfortunately that seems impossible due to the
imposed preferences of the author.

------
jonhohle
A fun `kindlegen` story from my past:

When the Kindle Fire was being launched, part of the out-of-the-box experience
was that a) it already knew what account it was associated with and b) if you
weren't already a Prime member, it phoned home and automatically gave you a
non-renewing 1-month free "preview" (not a "trial", since those automatically
converted into paid memberships) of Prime so you could watch Prime video, use
Kindle lending library, etc. on your brand new device. As secret projects go,
the Prime team was brought in very late and given a very short integration
window (2-ish weeks, maybe) to determine if that feature would make the cut
for launch.

Part of the user experience was getting a "personalized" letter delivered
through the Kindle delivery mechanism that included the Prime logo and JeffB's
signature. This letter was effectively a Mobi ebook dynamically generated
before being pushed to the device. This functionality previously existed and
was how notes indicating that lent items had expired were generated, however,
those were plaintext and used a custom templating system that the Kindle team
(justifiably) didn't want to expose to external teams. The Kindle team wanted
us to generate a Mobi that they would pass along, which would have required a
bunch of new infrastructure and technology we had no experience with. A former
teammate who was now in Kindle made the case for us continuing to use the
extensive HTML custom messaging infrastructure we had, but the Kindle team's
capability limited them to hitting a single endpoint and we didn't have a nice
way to bundle all of our resources (images, content, etc.) into a single file
(e.g. zip, tarball). On a call one afternoon I suggested adding data URL
support so we could continue to leverage our infrastructure, they could
continue to leverage their's and only this small tool they shelled out to
would need to change.

Of course, the kindlegen team was not involved in the discussion initially,
their code did not use the tools the rest of the company used, for whatever
reason they were unwilling to accept code contributions, and they wanted
several months to implement the feature.

Being young and without kids at the time, I went home, knocked out a wrapper
that would convert data URLs to external resources and replace the references,
and then call out to kindlegen to generate the mobi, and had a working tool
the next morning. The whole thing went (almost¹) flawlessly, allowed Prime to
test and debug with the tools they knew, allowed the Kindle distribution team
to swap out one piece transparently, and the Fire launched with that
implementation in place. And like most stop-gap solutions, it was in place for
several years before kindlegen finally supported data URLs natively.

This was all running on Linux hosts, and that was many many years ago now.
It's a good reminder that code is like a sandcastle. It will be gone tomorrow,
but the tide will continue.

¹ sure, there may have been a small bug or two, but I stabilized a bunch of
their tests in the process, so I consider it a win.

------
ggm
I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can sell
content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and content,
and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is actually
pretty bad.

This is not a real substitutable space. Yes, we have other e-readers. No,
there is a market dominant platform and that has consequences.

Because book IPR is bound in past practices and publishers as a closed shop,
the motivations to fix this here, are mixed.

As readers/consumers I think we are ill-served by the outcome.

I suspect Authors, and authors agents would agree. its not equitable.

Not the least problem is that book IPR is very nationally focussed. Kindle is
a trans-national concept. The segmented market is hugely frustrating.

~~~
rumanator
> I feel strongly that Amazon can sell kindles and we're ok, and amazon can
> sell content and we're ok but having amazon able to sell both kindle and
> content, and direct IPR outcomes across the platform and the content, is
> actually pretty bad.

Was anyone doing any of that prior to Amazon's bet on kindle?

~~~
ggm
Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..

No. Kindle was transformative. But, we do not perpetuate market advantage when
things become a social utility, and to say "freedom of choice" when the IPR is
not actually equally available on all readers, when Kindle can (and do) delete
content from you, when they respect the global national IPR framework but also
intrude adverts into the flow...

~~~
rumanator
> Was anyone doing any of that prior to gutenbergs bet on the printing press..

That comment is disingenuous and outright deceitful.

Guttemberg wasn't selling ebooks that downloaded books from an online store.
My question was who else offered a similar product to Amazon when Amazon
launched Kindle.

~~~
ggm
Did you read the rest of my comment? It addressed the matter of substance. Ask
yourself what other field of a like nature has led to an outcome of this type.
Does a Sony VHS only read Sony produced films? Does a Philips CD player only
play Dutch cds? Does an iPhone only play iPhone music? Does chrome refuse to
show pages for Microsoft?

The Kindle imposes a strong wall that (pdf aside) says only Kindle managed
epub is routinely available and then imposes constraints on how content is
added 'for a better reader experience'

------
rriepe
Wow, huge bummer. This is how I generated and edited my Kindle book... not
sure what to do now.

~~~
vetinari
If you have your copy of kindlegen, it will continue to work - it is a 32-bit
statically linked binary, so as long as your kernel supports 32-bit processes
and 32-bit ELF files, you are good to go.

That it is available for download changes nothing; it has not been updated for
years anyway. The mac version was in worse shape, it was also 32-bit, so it
didn't run on Catalina at all.

~~~
rriepe
Ironically I've just made a Mac-to-Linux workflow change.

I can probably still figure something out with another machine and Windows.
Thanks for the tip though.

------
xvilka
> EPUB requires readers to support the HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, SVG formats,
> making EPUB readers use the same technology as web browsers.

I wish people would develop cleaner FB3 (Fiction Book) rather than messy and
overcomplicated ePub.

------
Animats
How are you supposed to generate Kindle-format content on AWS, then?

------
bluedays
Haven't been able to use my Kindle with Linux for a while anyway. I regret
buying the device.

~~~
jklinger410
What is the best alternative to a Kindle?

~~~
se32point1
I can't say for you, but there are plenty of other options. PocketBook (which
recently released a color e-ink ereader), Kobo, Onyx (which I have heard
negative things about regarding their unwillingness to comply with the GPL for
their Linux kernel), the ReMarkable (which I have heard is incredibly
hackable), and the Nook. There's probably even more I'm forgetting, but
Kindles are definitely not the only option.

------
nickcotter
Will this affect services like Crofflr, or do they use a different mechanism?

~~~
mzehrer
[crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the
currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to
switch to calibre based tooling.

------
jordache
i hate how kindle doesn't support adobe DRM, which many libraries use for
lending out ebooks.

------
alpineidyll3
Anyone looking for a Kindle replacement the Boox line of products are
excellent alternatives.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
That's the one from China that uses Linux without complying with the GPL,
right?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chinese_company_will_not_share_their/)

------
monadic2
They still read epub, right?

Their proprietary format didn't have many convincingly useful features anyway.

~~~
turtlebits
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).

~~~
liability
They also load PDFs and plain text files (IIRC) though those are not quite
'eBook formats.'

~~~
monadic2
I've personally found the pdf on kindle experience to be absolutely
frustrating but YMMV I'm sure.

