Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

As it's looking like nook is nearing its end as a maker of ereaders, and I need to get a new one soon (e-ink not color thank you very much) I'm close to jumping over to the kindle paperwhite. Main thing is, I have shit tons of (non drm) Epubs and PDFs, and while I don't mind converting them piecemeal to mobi, I want to make sure people have had good experiences with kindle's little thingy where you email yrself other file formats and they convert over. Have the results been pretty readable? Anything come out butchered to hell? Thx.

iirc epubs don't convert—i occasionally mix one in with my other files when i'm sending. pdfs are copied, not converted, and they are as readable as the originals (w/ allowances for some w/ very poor rendering which is usually made up for by the more powerful desktop renderer).

calibre will bulk convert. generally my epub->mobi conversions are plenty usable; occasionally i noticed a bit of wonky formatting, but nothing to mind.

Oh right I can do ePub to mobi in calibre, that's true...

Calibre will pretty much convert them on the fly when you copy them to your device, in practice I don't even think about it. I've yet to encounter a PDF that wasn't an unreadable shitshow on an eInk eReader, so I don't mess with them.

Does using the Amazon email conversion thing mean the title is then tied to your Kindle account and available via the cloud?

you have to convert to mobi before sending it to your kindle, I've accidentally sent myself an epub and it immediately bounced. I 2x calibre, works perfectly for me (and it strips drm if you ever have a need for that as well).

I can access docs I emailed to my paperwhite on the cloud, there's also a small app called send to kindle for pc that amazon provides, you can just right click on the mobi you want to send and there's a toggle for uploading it to the cloud of not.

Thanks, that's good to know!

I love my Paperwhite I recently got, everything has been great.

On newer kindles I think converting to azw3 might somtimes provide better results than converting to mobi - since azw3 (mobi’s replacement) is a html/css container, like epub, whereas mobi is its own thing.

I wish there was a way to convert PDFs to epub/mobi, I have tried loads of converters and always get the same broken results, even from the trial versions by these gits that try to gaffel your money for some useless shit that is no better than the freeware. If anyone hears about a functional PDF converter, please post it onto this thread.

in the uk the kobo auras seem to be reaching end of life as well - argos has them for £55 (£25 cheaper than usual) and nowhere else seems to have any stock. time to upgrade (backlight! sd slot! shiny!) from my mini? (which was only £10 cheaper than that when i bought it)

(oh, i'm too late by the look of things, gone from argos website)

xp

Calibre is a good converter with lots of options to tweak the output

Results are usually bad with pdfs, but it's a problem with the source format not the converter. Even the best output will have problems with paragraph structure and line breaks. In calibre you can play around with the line un-wrap factor to try and improve this. If you want to get rid of repeated page headers and other formatting elements that break up the flow of the text, you need to go into advanced find & replace / regex. Calibre does that too.

Are PDFs which displayed tolerably on my nook simple touch likely to be fine on kindle as well?

i can't compare but honestly, i read a lot of pdfs on my paperwhite and rarely have a problem with unreadable renders of text. and when i do, they're discernible, just not so pleasant to use as most pdfs.

anything produced by a computer (like print to pdf or a digital production from a publisher) rather than a scan will likely appear to have nothing wrong with it at all.

Yeah PDFs which consist of scanned page images are p much impossible to enjoy on anything but a tablet screen.

xps Calibre is great (if possibly a bit overwhelming since it offers so much under the hood). It was basically the only tool I could find that could decently corral 10+ years worth of ebook collecting into one central place and then convert everything from like 15 different formats into either PDFs or EPUBs. Like Vasco said, you can really go tweak-crazy with Calibre. Now I just wish Marvin for iOS supported PDFs :/

there should be an easy way of converting pdfs with embedded text to ebooks but I don't know how to do it, even with calibre. actually I kinda hate calibre b/c of the shitty interface, I use it with the command line to do conversions instead. but yeah, just a pdf's text to epub would be great, without keeping formatting or whatever.

You just send the pdf as an attachment to your Kindle with the subject line "convert"

I know how to send pdf to kindle but does the convert email just strip the text?

Amazon document service does apply processing, it tries to restore paragraph structure when it thinks it has been lost, just like calibre does (when you have 'heuristic processing' enabled). It probably won't do this if the pdf is already well formatted (i.e. it's computer generated). In Calibre you can choose to output plain text without any processing, - it will work fine with computer generated pdfs, but if it's something scanned, the result is always messy and not suitable for e-readers.

it's weird that it would convert emailed files but not be able to handle pdfs in-browser at all with the 'send to kindle' add-on

I lost my kindle last year, and the new one won't receive anything that I shift+K in Firefox. I wonder if the airline employee in Ottawa who ended up with the old one is getting everything instead.

Got the paperwhite at Best Buy on the way home. Converted the ePub I'm in the middle of -- The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson -- to mobi and side loaded it via calibre, but it wouldn't open that. I then converted it to the newer kindle format -- whose name
I can't remember rn -- and that worked fine. Wonder if I should batch convert my Epubs to that format instead of mobi?

yeah, converting to mobi with Calinbre doesn't work for me at all anymore

azw3 all the way

Cool, good to know

does the email-converter (w/ 'convert' in subject line) have any settings or settable flags?

it nicely turned my word-to-pdf pdf into standard azw3-formatted text except that it treated every line from the pdf as hard-coded rather than wrapping it : /

whitespace handling is pretty dumb too

anyone use the 'send to kindle' add-on for firefox? mine has become inoperable in the past few days, with no indication as to why.

There was talk recently of a mandatory update for older kindles. Could that be it? Something to do with keys.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201994710

That's a few days away yet, so probably not that.

so, kobo glo hd or kobo auro h2o? My Kobo touch has just died. H2o looks bulky, but reviewers say the 6.8 screen makes it feel like real book, and you really get used to it. Glo seems more in keeping with the touch.

they still sell the touch, it's the only one that looks reasonably priced at £70, even £109 for the glo HD seems like a lot of money, let alone the £140 for the aura. #kobomini4life

Mm yes, but i think im willing to pay extra for the light, plus the better pdf handling and screen quality sounds good.

Has anyone had a problem with their Kindle (paperwhite version) where the battery drains even when not being used?

My wifi isn't turned on so that's not the issue. I read somewhere that sometimes the Kindles struggles to index books (whatever that means) and so gets stuck in a loop. But I've deleted almost all my books and it still drains.

Pretty crap.

yeah mine has done that when i've let it sit for a couple weeks

I bought my paperwhite 2nd hand on ebay over a year ago and the battery hasn't noticeably degraded at all and it has never happened to mine. I permanently have mine on aeroplane mode and use the pc app to do any purchases, idk if that helps.

nothing about this makes me want to buy it: http://mashable.com/2016/04/13/amazon-kindle-oasis

original one was v good, the paperwhite one a fair bit better. can't think of any real ways they can improve on this. let it go, amazonpaws

@!#$#$ing typesetting

oh boy, mandatory leather cover... does it come with a wizard hat too?

I could see this being more comfortable to hold than the one I've got now (Voyage, I think), but I'd have to wait til I saw it in person.

yeah i kinda like it, but there is zero reason to get one if you already have a functional kindle. like, when i lose mine maybe i'll consider it

I like that they brought back physical buttons, but why would anyone pay $200 more than for a kindle paperwhite?

why would anyone pay $200 more

they're playing up the "thinnest, lightest ever" aspect, no doubt in homage to Apple. next up: the Kindle wristwatch

are left handed people SOL?

I assume you can just change the screen orientation in order to use it with your left hand

but the embossed logo on the leather cover will be upside down 8(

people on the tube will point and laugh

They will mostly point and laugh because you paid $300 for an e-reader

They will be too busy sneaking an admiring glance at the 300ppi screen to laugh. "Wow! I have never seen such well defined e-ink text before"

it has a mechanism that automatically changes the button directions when you rotate it and switch hands.

i love the idea of buttons but i just got a paperwhite in the last year and i really have no reason to upgrade. and i thought $200 for the voyage was too much, this is even more ott.