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

[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