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

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: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: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: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.