Taking a Look At Kindle Format 8

Nate the greatest writes "Got a Kindle Fire? Here's your chance to try the new Kindle Format 8. The new format is in beta testing right now with a limited number of publishers, and a few days ago one of those publishers leaked the tools and the guidelines to me. It turns out KF8 isn't all that new. I've looked at the code, and I'd call it an attempt to graft a number of Epub features onto the existing Kindle format. It simply adds a lot of new formatting and is only slightly more capable than Epub. There's a number of screenshots at the link as well as a demo file. You can probably also find more KF8 ebooks in the Kindle Store; look for the Kindle Fire exclusive magazines and graphic novels."

Comments

Epub is the standard for digital books

[EponymousCustard]

It makes me sad that Amazon don't support it natively.

Re:Epub is the standard for digital books

[Defenestrar]

It makes me sad that the article doesn't even mention which epub version (1, 2, or 3) the author was comparing it to. Most new books are in 3, but there's a ton still out there at version 2. Not to mention that the International Digital Publishing Forum [IDPF] is an active standard and will continually be updated for the foreseeable future. Some quantitative data would be very useful when comparing proprietary and open standards, especially as each format (and distribution system) have strong pros and cons. Personally I'm all for fully open standards for any data type, it'd take a lot of superior features to draw me into a vendor lock-in system.

Re:Epub is the standard for digital books

[boristhespider]

It would be pretty trivial for Amazon to keep backwards compatibility - Sony have already demonstrated that when they transitioned from LRF to ePub. It all went seamlessly, Readers still support LRF (so far as I know; certainly my old PRS-505 does) and read ePub no problem, or if you want you can go to the Sony store and redownload anything you'd bought as an LRF as an ePub instead. Amazon could do exactly the same - it's just a matter of adding ePub support (which would itself be trivial; Mobi and ePub aren't *that* different) and converting their eBook store into ePub.

I doubt they want to do this and that's their prerogative, but it would be trivial to do if they ever did choose to.

"Exclusively"

[wygit]

I'm wondering how many different "exclusive" editions publishers are going to publish in.
This is stupid. The only paid "exclusive" iPad publications I have are magazines that had a free iPad subscription when you bought the dead-tree edition.

Re:"Exclusively"

[mcgrew]

That's one big reason why I'm ignoring Kindle and looking at the Nook. Of course, I may just forego an e-reader completely; I have a notebook and may get a tablet. With a tablet I see no use for an e-reader.

Re:"Exclusively"

[0123456]

With a tablet I see no use for an e-reader.

I guess you don't read much, or you'd know how much better an e-ink screen is for reading books.

Not to mention that I only have to recharge my Kindle every few weeks, so I just leave it plugged in when I connect it to my computer every now and again to download non-Amazon books to it.

Re:"Exclusively"

[Nursie]

"With a tablet I see no use for an e-reader."

I've used both. I don't see a need for a tablet (I have a netbook), but the e-reader (kindle touch 3g) is pretty great. It's the ultra-long battery life and e-ink display that do it.

Re:"Exclusively"

[Lumpy]

I cant. Kindle is the ONLY ones making a 10" epaper display. Nook is a tiny toy great for paperbacks but useless for educational and scientific texts.
If nook would release a 10" unit or better yet an a4 page size screen unit. I would be all over it as would every single college student and college looking for a decent reader for college textbooks.

Re:"Exclusively"

[TheRaven64]

There's also the difference in size. The pictures really don't do the Kindle justice - I played with one in an airport shop and they're astonishingly thin and light. I have an iRex iLiad, which is one of the first generation of eInk devices. You could easily fit two or three 6" Kindles inside it. You could probably slip the kindle into a coat pocket without noticing. Doing that with the iLiad or a modern tablet would be difficult. The smallest tablet I own is a Nokia 770, and it fits, but it's much more bulky than a kindle. Most of the difference is the battery - a TFT screen draws a lot more power than eInk so an eInk device can get away with a tiny battery in comparison with a tablet (and a less power-hungry CPU, since you're not going to be playing back videos on the eBook reader).

Re:"Exclusively"

[hawguy]

I have to agree here. There is no substitute for an e-ink display when reading. I end up with horribly bloodshot eyes if I read an LCD non-stop for hours (whether for lack of blinking or something else, I don't know). I suffer no ill effects from reading off an e-ink display though.

I was surprised at the difference as well. I have an eInk Kindle, but got a Nook Color (with CM7 so I can run the Kindle app) for reading books in bed without needing a light that might keep my partner awake. I figured that the backlit display with the brightness turned down to low would be perfect for reading in a dark room.

Well, I was wrong, reading the Nook for more than 30 minutes is uncomfortable while I can read the Kindle for hours, even with a clip-on book light.

So now I use the Nook for web surfing and the Kindle for reading.

Just one thing...

[Penguinisto]

It may be a sign of getting old, but seriously - if I laid down hard cash for something, I'm not in much mood to be a beta tester on it. This is doubly true for items which are locked down to one proprietary vendor. Triply true for an item (like, say, this tablet) which should be homogeneous to the point where developers really don't have to account for a wild variety of configurations, so the whole idea of accounting for differences should be pretty frickin' moot.

Now sure, I'll hackintosh my desktop box (which I had done) or happily goof off with a new Linux distro, but only because the former is assembled out of older parts, and the latter is in a VM first, before I decide whether or not to migrate it to my main home server box.

OTOH, the Kindle Fire is a product that (much like the iPad, to be fair) serves as nothing more than a front for Amazon's app/media store. Screw that - if they want me to test it out that bad for them, they can damned well pay me as a tester.

Aw hell... more standards for me to publish to.

[inflex]

It's already a nightmare trying to cover all the bases as a book writer/publisher, adding more to the mix just makes things more annoying, confusing and likely to pop up crazy formatting mistakes. The forums are already filled with people having enough grief getting a decent looking eBook generated (though I blame them for using MSWord... tsk tsk *hugs LaTeX*). A lot of us would LOVE it if Amazon simply supported ePub, though that would in many ways erode their empire, at least in their view. Right now a lot of publishers are pushing out mobi / ePub / pdf as the main 3 formats to support, at least along with print publishing, unfortunately even within ePub there's a few quirks and you have to generate slightly different versions for iPad, Nook and 'everything else'. ... reminds me of the bloomen browser wars at their worst ... and to think I switched to doing novels / writing / publishing to try avoid this sort of crap *maniacal laugh*.

http://elitadaniels.com/

Re:Aw hell... more standards for me to publish to.

[thomas.galvin]

I think the fact that Amazon uses a proprietary format is a heaping pile of crap, but that's as a user, not an author. As an author, I just upload the ePub I generated for B&N and let Amazon handle the conversion to whatever they call their zip file full of HTML.

I use Scrivener to do my writing, and it exports to ePub directly. There's also a plugin that will export to Kindle format, if you want to do that. And it exports to Word, which is what I have to use for Smashwords. And it exports to PDF, which is what I use to edit. It's a fantastic piece of software.

But, yes, the rest of the world needs to get on the ePub train. It's a really nice format, very fit for what it does.

Re:Aw hell... more standards for me to publish to.

[inflex]

Given that I'm the geek *cough* and my wife is the writer, I put her on LyX, it has its shortcomings but for novels they're not a problem and it's a nice bridge between mainstream wordprocessing and my world :) (our biggest complaint lies with the dictionaries and grammar... but then we do have editors that we contract). Anyhow, from within LyX we just do the HTML export and then import via Calibre with our own tweaked stylesheet to give us the mobi and epub. For print-publishing of course LyX/LaTeX does a bloomen nice job with very little work as we all know.

I do like the the Palitino font combined with the Memoir document class. Unfortunately of course, all that goes down the chute for the eBooks :(

I have a great deal of bitterness towards Smashwords and their singular MS-Word submission format, rather a stab in the eye considering their profit is built on OpenSource software - but that's something I've complained about long and hard to Mark's face with thus far very little gain.

No doubt other independent publishers reading these comments know still how annoying it can be when you think you've got everything finished and a few hours after you've released the book you get an email from a reader "Your formatting is totally broken on device XYZ" :(

Cracked yet?

[GSloop]

The AZW format got broken a long time ago, and while I don't purchase a lot of content from Amazon, I don't buy ANYTHING I can't break the DRM on so I can move it [sell it, give it away, etc] at my convenience.

I'm sure not going to purchase a bunch of content on Amazon that's lost/stuck because I decided I wanted to get a different device to read it with.

So, hows the cracking with the new format going? Once it's cracked, I'll consider buying it, at least once I decide to buy a KF.

Seriously, once books move into a more reasonable price range in general, I'd guess that it clearly doesn't make sense to use DRM. MP3's made this transition once the vendors realized that $20 for a CD wasn't going to fly for MP3's. Books are going to do it too, I suspect, and sooner rather than later.

But until then, I'll avail myself of the tools to do what the publisher failed to do right - and if that's not possible - well, I just won't buy it at all.

-Greg

Re:Cracked yet?

[Colonel Korn]

Seriously, once books move into a more reasonable price range in general, I'd guess that it clearly doesn't make sense to use DRM. MP3's made this transition once the vendors realized that $20 for a CD wasn't going to fly for MP3's. Books are going to do it too, I suspect, and sooner rather than later.

Sadly, ebooks are moving away from reasonable prices, not toward them. Apple managed to raise ebook prices by roughly 50% when they negotiated deals with the publishers before the iPad's launch. Given another major vendor willing to charge much more for books, the publishers were unwilling to allow Amazon to continue selling at their sometimes below cost price point, and now they had the leverage to do something about it. I hope that Apple's influence wanes so that prices can come back down, or that cheaper prices align with Apple's interests at some point in the near future.

Re:Cracked yet?

[inflex]

Depends on where you stand... right now, from an independent writer's perspective, eBook prices are plummeting - couple of years ago most people were at $2.99 and $0.99 was the 'magical free marketing ride', then last year going $0.00 was the key and everyone was trying to get on the Amazon free bandwagon to get some exposure... I expect soon that writers will be _paying_ people to read their book. In the race to the bottom, it seems we're going to punch through and start digging our own graves. We've personally actually stopped ourselves and put our eBooks back to $1.49~$2.99, there's nothing wrong with asking people to pay $2.99 for a 40k~100k word book, hell that's less than a small coffee.

Watch each day and see what eBooks Amazon puts out for free, won't be long and you'll have enough material to last you a lifetime. Of course, if you're wanting eBook editions of a Big-6 published new release, then yes, you'll be lucky to get $0.50 off the price.

Advantage over PDF?

[stevenvi]

I really don't follow ebook formats because pdfs have always been my portable format of choice, and I have no ebook reader. I skimmed the article, but I could not find any points on what makes this superior to a pdf file. What advantages does the Kindle format or epub format offer which a pdf cannot do?

I saw some mention of audio and video and javascript, but pdfs can support that. Why recreate the wheel? From reading the article (where perhaps the author doesn't know what he is talking about?), it sounds like it's trying to do everything HTML can, but not be HTML.

Can anyone please clarify this for me?

Re:Advantage over PDF?

[artor3]

Most (all?) ebook readers let you adjust font and margin size. Formats like epub and mobi (azw) allow this to work without breaking the formatting. PDFs don't support that feature, so you have to either pan-n-scan or else be stuck with a tiny font size.

Re:Advantage over PDF?

[inflex]

As a general rule, PDFs cannot be reflowed (there is a new revision in the PDF standard that allows this now, but it's a bit of a crutch).

ePub/mobi/what-ever-other-ebook-format is more akin to HTML than Postscript/PDF, as such eBooks can then be read on all manner of devices without knowing in advance the limitations of the output media. So it's fine if you have a nice 9~10" tablet to read the PDFs on, and things like datasheets for electronics work well in this format, but if you try it on a 5~6" display device it becomes a case of either scrolling/panning to read or reading with a lot of detail lost.