The Kindle is Getting Support For HTML5

Nate the greatest writes "It looks like Amazon won't be adopting Epub after all. [Thursday] Amazon released some technical details on the new Kindle ebook format, which they are calling Kindle 8. There are a lot of interesting changes to the file, including new formatting and SVG images. The new tags are going to open up a whole lot of new possibilities for making Kindle ebooks."

Comments

DRM

[ondelette]

What about DRM?

Re:DRM

[EdIII]

Exactly.

I have been interested from the beginning, but not offense or trolling intended, but who gives a flying $(#)($ about a new format.

As long as Amazon still has control over my Kindle and can remove my "property" without knowledge or consent I could care less about significant improvements to the file formats and features. It's interesting, but I would rather know that Amazon has fundamentally changed its policies. That *would* be welcome news.

This is like Sony introducing a new firmware with some cool features..... but we still have to overlook that we are on a locked down paranoid platform, the PS3.

There was a lot I did not appreciate about Steve Jobs, but man did he give us some freedom to truly own our music again. I wish I could download purchased books without DRM like I can music.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

"In the agency model, publishers set the price and designate an agent--in this case the bookseller--who will sell the book and receive the 30% commission. Adopting the model for e-books tends to mean e-book prices will rise, something both publishers and independent retailers applaud. Publishers believe low e-book prices devalue their books and cannibalize hardcover sales. Under the agency model once a price has been set it cannot be changed or discounted by the retailer and independent e-book retailers believe the higher prices of the agency model allow them to compete with big e-book vendors. " (from this article)

At least Amazon was selling ebooks for reasonable prices and encouraging competition in the market. Now we have a racket that is enforced on all sellers. Neither he nor Amazon have been able to dissuade publishers from using DRM.

Re:DRM

[EdIII]

Interesting.

I never knew anything about that. Only thing I remember is that he gave me a viable alternative to piracy and/or purchasing over priced CDs.

It was the DRM that turned me off the Kindle from the first place, which is ironically, still a result from Steve Jobs. He was the one who showed me that eventually I could purchase DRM free music and I have not been interested in getting involved with any kind of transaction system that does not allow DRM free downloads.

Same reason why I will never have a Blockbuster account with video. "Purchases" are anything but.

Thanks for the insight into the publishing business. I don't mind paying the price for dead trees right now, because that does not have any DRM.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

Yes, I too think that DRM-free ebooks are a good thing.

If you read technical books, O'Reilly offers DRM-free ebooks from their website in several formats, including PDF, ePUB, and MOBI (Kindle-compatible).

They do this by marking your ebook: "Prepared for [your_email_address], [Your Name]" on the bottom of the pages. I think this is okay since it discourages piracy and marks the book as yours the same as if your wrote your name in the front cover of a paper book.

I hope that other publishers will adopt this practice or something similar.

Good News for Authors

[Sasayaki]

I'm writing a book for Kindle (naturalistic sci-fi, 61,000 words in) and I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...

If the Kindle supports HTML5 however, Google Docs will do a bang-up job (by and large) of converting it straight to HTML5. Good news for me I guess!

Re:Good News for Authors

[optimism]

I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup

Crikey.

I had no idea the Kindle conversion was as lame as you say.

I thought we software-folk had solved all the issues of converting basic formatted text about 20 years ago. Equations, vector graphics, embedded images...OK, they might still be cross-format hurdles.

But italics? Seriously? That's so 1980's

Re:Good News for Authors

[dgatwood]

KindleGen (at least in the shipping version, v1.2) is great as long as you don't mind 90% of your CSS going away in ways that are utterly mind-blowingly awful looking.

When generating content for Kindle for my novel, I have to produce a whole separate set of HTML source content with dozens of differences between that and proper EPUB (including a fair number of tags that aren't even legal in EPUB, but are the only way to get KindleGen to behave).

The short list is that:

• Right margins don't work.
• Width and min-width CSS don't work (but the HTML width attribute does).
• IIRC, padding doesn't work at all.
• The blockquote tag only indents for a single paragraph unless you close and reopen it.
• CSS class attributes with more than one class don't work. (Only the last one is used, IIRC.)
• Most CSS selectors that contain multiple tags with some symbol in between them are incorrectly treated in such a way that the rule applies to both classes.
• Font styles are completely nonexistent. You can't even do something as basic as specifying that parts of the content should be serif and parts should be sans-serif.

Basically, you should assume that you'll have to rewrite all your content to have exactly one CSS style for each paragraph or other block-level element, selected programmatically based on how you want it to behave. So if you want something to happen only on the first paragraph after a section heading in the appendices, you're going to end up with classes like " class='firstParagraphAfterSectionHeadingInAppendix' " or similar for those paragraphs.

I spent less than a day getting content working in a properly standards-compliant browser (including writing the code to translate it from XML), a couple more hours working around minor layout bugs on Nook, and around a week getting Kindle to look even remotely palatable. That's for somebody who writes parsers as part of his day job. I mean, don't get me wrong, I spent several weeks pounding on LaTeX for PDF output, so the Kindle experience was by no means the most horrible part of the process, but it was way up there.

Put bluntly, KindleGen isn't the answer. At best, it's the first 10% of the answer. The rest, you get to code yourself. That's why pretty much everybody I've ever encountered who has attempted to format an eBook for Kindle has pretty much come out the other side with a whole new vocabulary of swear words. :-D

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Out of interest, why on Earth are you writing it in Google Docs? When I write things I tend to use LaTeX, which probably strikes most people as even more insane but it compiles up to lovely PDFs, and it's pretty quick to swap it to HTML and build up an ePub or MobiPocket. I could of course write straight in HTML (or in markup which could be easily swapped to both) but I'm very used to LaTeX.

I've not had too many problems converting properly clean RTFs into ePub or MobiPocket and vice-versa using Calibre. I find it's actually a lot easier to build the LaTeX version for printed copies, convert it into the ePub version for an eBook, and then just use Calibre to port it to different formats. I've not had a noticeable issue yet.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Hmm, OK. I still think you're making more problems for yourself than necessary, though. Why don't you use a WYSIWIG HTML editor? Or LibreOffice, which may or may not make cleaner HTML than Google Docs? (I've no idea; I've not tried either. I stopped using word processor HTML export about twelve years ago when Word XP -- or even earlier; I forget -- spat reams of gibberish at me.)

Also, are you closely wedded to the Kindle Convertor? Can you not use Calibre to build a MobiPocket? Or are there features in the Kindle convertor that you need?

Sorry for the questions - genuinely interested. I've always targetted ePub and relied on Calibre to produce a readable MobiPocket for people with Kindles.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

You can get Sigil - it's a WYSISYG ePub writer. You can either write in the word processor window, or in the raw XHTML. I've not used it to build ePubs from scratch but I have used it to edit and clean them up and it's reasonably nice once you get used to its quirks.

Calibre's OK, but I'd stick to the command-line tools, if I were you. I find the GUI distracting and not really quite suited for the purpose I put it to, whereas the command-line tools are there to edit metadata (though you might want to edit the results by hand to avoid Calibre leaving its fingerprints everywhere) and convert from a multitude of input formats to a multitude of outputs. ePub -> Mobi/AZW is particularly clean since ultimately so far as I know it's swapping one subset of XHTML to another subset of XHTML.

Both are worth a try. You do lose the easy sharing that you're getting with Google Docs, but you can always replace that with something like DropBox.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

No problem :)

Focus on converting HTML into ePub - the output from PDFs tends to be really doggy. I know the developers are trying to improve that, but they're really hampered by the fact that PDF really isn't well suited to reflowing, no matter what Adobe do to amend that. But HTML to ePub should be very clean, and ePubs are easy to edit either by hand or with something like Sigil.

(In case you're not aware, to edit an ePub by hand, change the extension from .epub to .zip, unzip it, and go into the OEBS directory, or whatever they've called it. The files will all be in there as either HTML or XHTML, and you can work on them directly to clean up the most stubborn problems. Or just use Sigil and access the files that way.)

Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Is there a utility yet that converts all Flash (Actionscript, not just video and animations) into HTML5? Even if just enough to make a prototype for specifying how the human recoders finish the job, in less than 80% of the time to hand convert from scratch?

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[_merlin]

Flash lets designers build interactive content. Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that. You may not be interested in it, but there are some gems buried in NewGrounds along with all the crap. None of the other solutions are accessible to designer types the way Flash is. I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

Re:DeDRM

[shutdown -p now]

How would it make DRM any easier? DRM'd Kindle books are already "encrypted" HTML, just a much smaller subset of it - MobiPocket. Since DRM itself is completely orthogonal to the book format, I don't see how them moving towards HTML5 would change anything.

Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[MacTO]

I had a Kindle for a while, and it does what it is supposed to admirably. This new book format is bound to do things even better, which is great.

But everyone else seems to be using ePub. Libraries use ePub too. Which really means that if you buy a Kindle you're stuck in the Amazon ecosystem. Well, unless you find a publisher that is willing to use unprotected PDF or MOBI files. That sometimes happens for the books you buy. But that won't happen for libraries (which need some sort of DRM).

And libraries are a serious concern for me. The ebook/digial audio book section is already confusing enough with device support.

Making HTML5 animations how?

[tepples]

Professional designers have either the breadth of skills to take on whatever tools will do the job, or the depth of skill that they can partner with professional tool developers.

So what "professional tool developers" have published an SVG-animation or canvas-animation creation tool that approaches the capability of even Flash from a decade ago?