Would extracting the Kindle highlights from the 'my clippings' file break some usage policy? I read all sort of things on my kindle, not only ebooks bought on Amazon, so often I want to get hold of the highlights and use them as notes or memories of what I've read (think there are online apps that let you do that too).

So I was wondering: in principle, do the contents of that file belong to me and can be used at my own discretion, or by accessing it I break some of the Amazon's rules?

I am not aware of any Amazon or other usage policy regulating the use of this file.

The highlights are excerpts (quotes) from the book's content, so the copyright to those excerpts belongs to whoever owns the copyright of the content of the book.

However, in most jurisdictions there are exceptions to copyright law that let you do a lot with quotes/excerpts without breaking the law  (e.g. fair use in the USA, fair dealing in the Commonwealth area, private use exception in the EU, etc.).

This means that while the contents of the clippings file does not belong to you, you can do almost anything you can imagine with it for your own personal use.  However, you do not have the right to republish your clippings (e.g.: "Clippings from XYZ selected by magicbirth") as an ebook or physical book.


I would like to view full cover of converted pdf ebook originally purchased on Kindle Store I would like to view full cover of pdf ebook originally purchased on Kindle Store and then converted with Ultimate. I see the thumbnail on my adobe reader app on my ios device. I would like to know how to extract the cover image as I would like to read the editorial details on the expanded cover. The full cover image is not viewable in the Kindle App (even on original file), Adobe Acrobat, or Foxit PDF. It is puzzling that I can only view this on the acrobat reader app on my ios device. Please advice how to view and/or extract full cover image.

You can create an image of the page you desire to be displayed as the cover, and then have calibre use that image as the cover.

If you already have an image, then open the metadata editor and on the right side of that pop-up notice that under the cover image is a button to browse. Use that to select your desired image.

In your case, you don't yet have an image and I understand that you want to use a particular page of the e-book. What follows is a simple one-liner for the linux (debian) command-line using mutool from package mupdf-tools; if you don't use linux, it may be that the exact same package / program exists for your operating system, or you can look for a corresponding command...

mutool draw -o "OUT-%d.png" IN.pdf PAGE-NUMBER

... where OUT is your desired output filename, IN.pdf is your ebook, and PAGE-NUMBER is the page number of your desired cover.


High resolution small-size pdf PDFs on archive.org are in high resolution yet has relatively small size. For example, this book. The book's resolution is 500 ppi and 46 Mb size.

What I did was I extract the pages using Adobe Acrobat to png with ppi 500, compressed using PNGGauntlet and take 150 pages out of it and combined them using Acrobat. What I got was a 107
Mb PDF file. This is ridiculous because it's has far lesser pages yet 2.5 times bigger.

How does one make a small pdf like the original one?

The size of a PDF file is dependent on the content of that file. A PDF file is a bundle of streams, with mostly compressed data.

If you generate a PDF file from e.g. a Word or OpenOffice document, these file tend to be relatively small, especially if you do not include Font information and rely on the system provided fonts or font substitutions.
Adding images to your text will make the files much larger.

Since PDF is one of the minority of image file formats that support multiple images, it is often (mis-)used to store multiple images, that e.g. come from a scan. Those scans are often already compressed JPEG images and for those the PDF file works only as a container (no, or little further compression  is possible). For those kinds of PDF files, the size can be very large, depending on the pixel size of the images (scan resolution x paper format) and in case of lossy compression (JPEG) the quality of the compression.

If you extract such lossy image files to a lossless format like PNG immediately blows up each of the images often by an order of magnitude. So your results are not surprising.

It would be much better to just extract the individual pages of the file into separate PDF files and recombine only the pages that you need. This can be done without  having to decompress the streams containing the imagery e.g. by a program like pdftk. If you pick half of the pages of a book, you can expect to have halve the size document in the end (on average).


How to reset Kobo web browser bookmarks on Kobo Mini I have made many bookmarks on my Kobo, but I don't want any of them anymore. How can I clear the bookmarks in the Kobo web browser?

there should be an "x" ico next to each bookmark URL, and when pressed, a box should pop up and ask you if you would like to delete the bookmark. Simply press yes if you do and no to exit.


collection shows as empty and refuses to populate -- not syncing properly I had a few collections on the Amazon Kindle web interface populated with books purchased through Amazon, readable through the web reader.  However, I wasn't able get my Kindle to sync with the cloud so that they even showed as available until resetting the Kindle to factory defaults.

Might this be related to pending deliveries?  Or, the download queue?

I confirmed that books were being downloaded, that there was sufficient free space.  And, yet, the Kindle showed the collections as empty until it was reset to factory defaults.

I even selected the items and attempted to deliver them to the specific device, which was reported as being successful.  However, the pending deliveries remained unchanged.

It was as if the items weren't showing due to incompatibility with the Kindle reader -- and yet, clearly, they were compatible.  How do I know that the items are compatible?  Because, by resetting the Kindle to factory defaults the content loads.  But, and here's the key point:  only after resetting the Kindle.

Therefore, the problem lies with the Kindle itself, or at least how it syncs -- and not with the content.  Yet, it seems like the content is incompatible.

see also:

Kindle collections and books not synching properly

That salient point being that other users report that what shows on Manage Your Content, the web interface, does not get similarly reflected on a Kindle e-book device.  What I describe is a little different, but, probably, the result of the same underlying bug.

I think I see the problem (or one problem at least).

I have a massive set of collections on the kindle app for android. (Like 50 collections holding 2000 or more ebooks).

But when I install the Kindle for PC app for my Windows desktop, it does not let me import the organized collections from the Kindle app for android. When I use the Kindle for PC app, there is an IMPORT COLLECTIONS option, but it prompts me to choose between two older devices instead of my current android devices. These older devices used a type of collections which is different from the current one.

If I create a NEW collection on Kindle for PC and add ebooks to it, this new collection does not appear on my android app or even on Manage Your Content and Devices page.

You would assume that collections propagate to all Kindle platforms, but what I'm seeing now is that any collections you create on Kindle for PC will not be propagated onto your other reading systems. As you see, you can still access your ebooks, but you can't use the collections from your other devices.

You're not doing it wrong; the Windows program is just using an incompatible kind of collection system.

On the plus side, any collections you make on Kindle for PC are just for that computer -- and nothing else. (Just to be safe, I would create only a small number of collections on Kindle for PC). I have verified that annotations on the Kindle for PC propagate (albeit slowly) to other devices.


Screen between 6" and 9.7" Are there any ebook readers with electronic paper and screen between 6" and 9.7"? I can find only such with an ordinary laptop-like screen...

Here are four:

Kobo Aura HD (6.8" screen)
ICARUS8 e-reader (8" screen)
Kindle DX (9.7" screen)
Bookeen Cybook Ocean (8" screen, status 2013-12: announced)


Is there any open standard for ebook notes format? Is there any open or semi-open standard for ebook and notes/highlighting storage/format which is used by multiple ebook reader vendors and/or ebook reader software?

The short answer, no.

Kindle uses what is called a My Clippings.txt file using standard text formatted in a particular way. Here is an example that was taken from this readme file on a GitHub project (modified slightly to remove leading comment characters).

  97_Things_Every_Programmer_Should_Know
  - Highlight Loc. 250-51 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 06:10 AM

  As soon as you make the decision to compromise, write a task card or
  log it
  ==========
  97_Things_Every_Programmer_Should_Know
  - Highlight Loc. 298 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 06:19 AM

  the best way to capture requirements is to watch users.
  ==========
  97_Things_Every_Programmer_Should_Know
  - Note Loc. 1453 | Added on Sunday, January 02, 2011, 09:40 PM

  this is a personal note
  ==========

Sony Reader provides .note files. These are just wrapped .svg files (scalable vector graphics, an XML based image format). I believe this is because the Sony Reader notes can be annotations, doodles via a stylus and text highlights. You can find out more information about extracting them here.

Kobo, according to this thread, stores annotations in [epub-filename].annot, which is a standard XML file. I'm not sure if this differs for other eBook formats.

You get the point. There is no single standard format or way to handle annotations. That being said, perhaps someone could take various open source tools and create a single utility for exporting and/or importing annotations to various devices (sounds like an interesting side project...).


Does Microsoft allow official readers of "lit" format other than MS Reader? Back when I last checked (couple of years ago), if you wanted to read .lit format books, you had to either install MS Reader software (which meant only Windows PC), or download a somehat-shady (not sure if legal or not, but certainly not official) c-lit converter.

These days, are there any programs (for Android, or Linux, or Windows) which officially support .lit file format? (I don't need a list, merely the "yes/no" fact of whether Microsoft allows at least one of them to exist with their official OK, or whether their official stance is "no other programs are allowed to").

Well, since Microsoft has pretty much abandoned MS Reader… you might try using Calibre to convert the files to eOub or Mobi. That is, if there's no DRM on them.

As for your yes/no question — the answer is no, but allow me to additionally provide the reason.

The reason that there is no alternative LIT reader for Android and/or other operating systems is simple: writing a LIT reader would put the app developer in legally dangerous waters. LIT is a closed format created and owned by Microsoft and any attempts to support it would be quite questionable from legal point of view. Personally, I doubt anyone would want to test the abilities of Microsoft's legal department.

Quoting the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act to point to just one of many legal problems a developer might clash into:

  DMCA "criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself." This is from the DMCA's wikipedia page

So, until Microsoft decides to officially make the closed LIT format available to the public, or at least modifies their relevant licensing accordingly… I wouldn't count on alternative LIT reader to be born.


It's possible to add a background-color: / background: BLACK (with white text) for a page in an AZW3 ebook? I'm trying to make a page black background with white text but it doesn't work. (AZW3 format)

Any ideas for html code?
I've tried both background and background-color and they don't work.

It's possible to make an AZW3 ebook (or a section of an ebook) to have black background and white text by adding style="background-color:black;color:white" to the <body> tag of the html file with text inside your AZW3.

The problem is whether your chosen e-reader will display the background. For example, the internal Calibre reader will happily show black pages with white text; on the other hand, my Kindle Paperwhite 3 will not respect the background-color setting on body, but will use the color parameter, rendering white text on white background and making the book unreadable!

Not ideal, to put it mildly.

To get around this, you can set the background color on a div wrapping the text. The downside is that there will always be a white border around the page, because both Calibre reader and Kindle seems to apply its own page borders and ignore any margin or padding settings on <body> or <html> tags.

If I really wanted to do this, I would set the background and text color on both body and a wrapper div - that way I'd get a nice black pages on compliant e-readers, and black rectangles on Kindle and co.

...and then I'd try to test it on as many e-readers as possible, because Murphy's law is a thing, and any styling that has the potential of rendering the content unreadable will probably do it. ;P


How to destructively scan well preserved books? How do I best destructively scan well preserved books, with the goal of reading them on dedicated e-readers, tablets, computers, etc.?

It depends on the amount of books: If you have more than several thousand you should get it done professionally, possibly you could also get a special deal on buying them already ocr'd and everything. Abort this guide here.

If you absolutely need true text ebooks where you can freely adjust font size and the like, scanning yourself is also not a good idea. OCR is too much of a manual process. But for most purposes, it should be ok to scan the pages as images. Try to buy the largest e-reader you can so the text doesn't end up too small. 7.8" should be good enough, but some books will appear a little small unless you can cut the pages up and rotate the screen so that the lines are parallel to the longer side of the screen. On computers and tablets and the like zoom functions work well enough that you should have no problems even on average phone screens.

So if you are still in, there are a few steps:

Separate book into individual pages.
Scan pages with scanner using adf automatic document feed.
Merge pages into a pdf per book.
Import into calibre e-book management (optional).
Cut the pages into two or three pieces in the whitespace between lines - this enables you to have bigger font sizes on ebook readers where the screen aspect ratio doesn't match the book aspect ratio. Other assorted image improvements.
Instead of cutting the pages into a few pieces, you can do OCR which enables to book to reflow exactly to the font and screen size of your choosing. This is optional and not recommended if the book is still in copyright and you are just doing this for yourself to read the book. Otherwise you should go help the people on Project Gutenberg and the like - they have processes to ensure the best possible quality.

Separate book into individual pages

If a books has a hard cover (that can't go through the scanner), cut it off with a paper knife. You need two cuts, one at the front and one at the back.

The next step depends on the amount of books:

Only a few: You can cut the pages apart with a paper knife.
More: You first separate the book into stacks that fit into a paper guillotine.

The sad truth is that for most books, you can just rip them apart. This doesn't apply to bound books where the pages are bound together with thread, but even hardcover books that might look like the have thread are often just glued. Open it as wide as possible, more than 180°, to pre-break the back. Then grip both halves at the top, firmly gripping both bundles so you don't pull on individual pages. Then slowly pull the halves apart. As long as you pull slowly, the glue tends to rip before the paper and even if sometime the paper tears a little, the tears very seldom reach into the printed text.
If you have a bound book, you need to unbind it, don't try to rip it apart. I haven't encountered enough of those to give many tips.
Then feed the bundles into a paper guillotine. If you have hundreds of books (or less if your time is valuable), get a paper guillotine with at least 5mm cutting depth, which will set you back around US$ 250. That way you can cut apart most books in less than 10 steps. If you have several thousand books (or less if your time is valuable), get a paper guillotine with at least 5cm cutting depth, which will set you back around US$ 1000. That way you can cut apart most books in one go (just remove hard covers first, those are usually not good for the blade).

Paper guillotine recommendation: Ideal 3005 (for up to hundreds of books) or a higher end one if it makes sense for you financially.

Scan

Make sure the title page or other distinctive page is the first page scanned. No harm in scanning such a page twice (once first, second time where it belongs). That way it will be easy to see where one book starts and another ends when you look at the sequence of scanned files.
Make sure the scanner puts all pages that you scan at once in a single pdf file - that way each book will only have a few files. That way it will be easy to see where one book starts and another ends when you look at the sequence of scanned files.
Choose the right color settings: Most scanners do a good job going from grayscale to black and white, so for normal black and white text, choose black and white. There have been informal studies that showed grayscale is not better for OCR than black and white and text display on e-readers is not improved by selecting grayscale, there is really no need for it. If there are color/grayscale images (or for the title pages, soft covers), you might want to choose color/grayscale for just those pages. If you scan grayscale/color the scans will be comparatively huge (as in, bigger than the movie version of the book). If the book is actually not that well preserved and the paper is not sufficiently white, you will need to scan it in color (and post process it to black and white if you want to read it on e-ink displays).
Always use the highest available resolution.
Don't mix up bundles of pages. I like to have stacks of separated books on one side of the scanner, and the pages of the currently scanned book that I already removed from the output tray on the other side.
When a books is finished, lay it on a floor or table with the cover up. Once you have it on your computer and made at least one backup copy (and only then), move the book into an appropriate (recyclable) waste bag or other container.
Use a scanner that doesn't need complex interaction to start a scan and which numbers its output files so you get them in the right order.

Scanner recommendation: Brother ADS 2800W, scan to USB stick, set up shortcut buttons for the scanning modes you need.

Merge pages into one pdf per book

My usual workflow is:

Go into preview/icon view mode in the file explorer, in the folder where the scans are.
You should be able to read the author and title from the previews.
Create a new folder (in another window) for each book named something like "author title", no need to be complete, this is going to be used as a search term later.
Copy the books files into the new folder.
Go into the folder where you have the nicely named book folders, and run the following script:

#!/bin/bash
set -x

mkdir -p out
for d in */; do
  if test "$d" = "out/"; then
      continue
  fi
  cd "$d"
  pdftk *.pdf cat output ../out/"$(basename "$d")".pdf &
  cd ..
done
echo -n "Waiting for pdftk..."
wait
echo " done."

Now you have an "out" folder with a pdf for each book, named like the folders you made.
Import the whole folder into calibre
Select the imported books, go to "edit metadata" and select "download metadata and covers".
Clean up the meta data and covers.
Back up your calibre database
Go through the physical books still lying around, verifying them in calibre (first few pages, last few pages, total amount of pages) and then throw them away.

Cut the pages into suitably sized pieces and other image conversions

I'm still working on that, but I have an automated script for denoising and compressing and also describe individual steps below.

Remove blank jpeg pages

Blank pages scanned in color (say the unprinted sides of soft covers for example) compress well, but still take some space and are also just annoying. Remove using pdftk input.pdf cat 1 3-r3 r1 output output.pdf (example removes second page and second to last page) or even a graphical pdf viewer using print to pdf.

Remove noise

For 600 dpi scans, -morphology Close Diamond:1 should remove noise and be pretty conservative about it, i.e. you don't risk removing too much. If you have a higher resolution, you can use Diamond:2 or higher, for a lower resolution possibly you can't use this method at all. As a second step, -define connected-components:area-threshold=30 -define connected-components:mean-color=true -connected-components 4 removes all blobs of black smaller than 30 pixels, which is also pretty safe if you set the amount of pixels to be less than the amount of pixels in a full stop (which is going to be the same for all scans at the same dpi, a value of 30 is good for 600dpi).

Compress using jbig2

The best compression algorithm for the purpose, achieves incredible compression ratios. Get encoder from Github, sadly you will need to compile it yourself.

It can handle files with noise and still achieves decent compression ratios, but then it takes forever. If you can remove some noise the output will be much smaller, more pleasant on the eye and generated in next to no time (compared to the denoising steps suggested above).

mkdir jbig2
cd jbigt2
../../jbig2enc/src/jbig2 -s -p ../input-image-folder/*.png
../../jbig2enc/pdf.py output > out.pdf

Script against noise and for compression

Available on github. Can take an hour per book, sorry. Use for example like this:

#!/bin/bash

for a in <list of author directories>; do
  for f in "${a%/}/"*/*.pdf; do
    sem -j 3 "nice -n 19 ../../incoming/compress.sh \"$f\" denoise"
  done
done

To use a parallelism of 3 and low scheduling priority of 19, so your computer remains responsive.


Content Property in EPUB 2 I am working with EPUB 2 specifications and I am trying to determine whether or not the content property is supported in EPUB2.  I know that it is for EPUB 3 - http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/guidelines/content/style/reference.php#css025-css21

I am using the content property to generate txt break symbols e.g. "*"

I can see them in my web browser but they are not showing up on my devices or previewers.  There is just a blank space with no asterisks.

    .TXBDINGBATS {
    font-family: SAT_disp_bold;

font-size:1.05em;
line-height: 1.4em;

text-align: center;
margin: .5em 0 .5em -1.3em;
text-indent: 0;

content: "\2217 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \2217 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \2217";
}

EPUB 2 specifies content as supported property in the list of CSS properties.

However, it is based on CSS 2.1, where the content property is allowed only for :before and :after pseudoelements. As the linked EPUB 3 spec shows (by linking to CSS 2.1), the same restriction applies in EPUB 3.

Thus, the code in the question won’t work, to the extent that it relies on the content property. Moving the declaration to apply to a pseudo-element, if applicable, should work in conforming software:

.TXBDINGBATS:before {
  content: "\2217 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \2217 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \a0 \2217";
}


How to stamp text to PDF, with a twist The closest case I came across in this site is this question:
How can I personalize each copy of a PDF to add the reader's name or email address to each page?

However, I need something more advanced which is to add numbers to PDF containing gift vouchers. Here's what I want to do:

Stamp the same PDF document with number, and save it with another filename.
Each new PDF file will contain different numbers. BUT, all pages in
1 PDF file contains the same number.
The numbers will be placed at 12 different locations each page (some
with different layout e.g text rotation), and repeated for all
pages; except the last page.
The last page of the document will be stamped with the same number,
but only in 9 different positions.

I managed to do the task using a PHP library SetaPDF-Stamper: http://www.setasign.com/products/setapdf-stamper/details/

But I need something more automatic (and preferably cheaper), since I need to create hundreds of PDFs.

I've been looking into various kind of PDF editor software (Windows applications), but they only support sequential and/or random numbering. While I need the same number to be stamped on the pages.

Maybe I don't understand the question, but if you can already do the job with SetaPDF-Stamper manually then all it takes is a little PHP code to do it automatically. There literally is no easier solution to your problem as described; to automate it will take custom code, period, and SetPDF-Stamper is the kind of library you would need for that purpose.


My HTML toc is not showing up in Calbre MOBI output My docx has an HTML linked TOC. I select Do Not Include table of contents and the output MOBI has the Go To Table of Contents greyed out. If I leave the Do Not include Table of Contents blank then the Go To works but links to an ugly read version of my lovely html table. Yes my html table is viewable when paging. It seems Calibre does not see my TOC bookmark in my source document. I am at a loss.
Thank you for any help.
Pat

Just a suggestion but you could try:

Outputting your DOCX format to html from within MS-Word,
Making sure that it all works including the ToC, when it is in HTML format, preferably using more than one browser, and then
Converting the HTML format to MOBI from within Calibre -

This will save Calibre from having to deal with 2 formats at once, (DOCX & HTML), which might be the source of the problem.


Where can I find a list of the limitations of iOS KF8 (Kindle format on iOS)? Apparently, Kindle devices/the Windows/Mac apps, and Android all support KF8 more or less completely, but on iOS, an AFK file is used that does not support all KF8 features (discussion here).

Is there a list of what isn't supported on iOS somewhere?  It's driving me crazy because I test on a Paperwhite and it's fine, but then I test on an iPad and things are broken...

I haven't tested on ios for a few months, but my experience has been that the differences between ios and other platforms in the last 2 or 3 years have reduced considerably.

A while back I compiled a list of the included fonts for each platform (including ios). What are serif and sans serif fonts on different ebook reading systems?

When I test on ios, I don't sideload anymore. I found that uploading through the Kindle Manage your Content and Devices is sufficient.

The main issue I encountered with Kindle on ios is that your styles don't work on larger displays (and that affects image sizing and placement). For that reason you need to use css media queries to differentiate between display sizes. I wrote which breakpoints I used on this thread (ignore everything but the last Update section) https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/a/6027/417

Some advanced designers/testers will note more subtle differences in support, but generally if reference the font correctly, handle images ok and used css media queries and have good fallbacks, everything will be sweet.


Is it possible to cap royalties for an ebook? I want to write and publish an ebook, but I am restricted to earning a set amount of income per month from all my income earning efforts.  Is there a way to cap the passive income from an ebook on a monthly basis if that gets too high certain months?  Essentially, I would be given the option by a publisher to monitor my earnings and modulate my income accordingly.  Example:

I can earn $100 a month.
Ebook A earns $50 in January
Ebook B earns $75 in January
I can decide to limit the income from Ebook B to $50 that particular month.

I feel sure you could LEGALLY, it's just a matter of contract, but I doubt any publisher would want to fool with such a complicated setup. I might be wrong though. Possibly you might find one who'd be willing to do a contract where, if your total royalties from them exceed some fixed cap (it would need to stay fixed - asking to let you change the cap monthly is unreasonable) the excess would go into promotion, might be doable. Alternately, you could simply spend that amount directly promoting your books yourself, and not bother the publisher. Then it would be a deductible business expense I'd assume and so wouldn't be "income". That is probably the simplest thing.


When should I completely poweroff an eink device rather than putting it in stand-by? Given that the technology of eink screens make it so that even during normal usage the power requirement is kept lower than other kind of displays, when it is advisable to completely shut-down the device instead than putting it in stand-by? I'm asking this for the sake of device (and possibly battery) health and power consumption.

As an example, I usually use stand-by, and this seems the handier solution when I use it multiple times in a day for many consecutive days, but maybe not when, i.e., I don't use it for a week or so. Or in other words, is there a time limit that marks the border between advisable poweroff or standby?

The biggest issue is likely to be background network use. For example, Amazon's Kindles will continue to use Whispernet and/or WiFi in the background. Assuming you have turned those features off, you would want to power it off entirely only if:

You plan to store it for a long period, on the order of months.
You plan to open up the physical case for some reason.


Are there any e-Readers that can't surf the net? Does anyone know of an e-Reader that doesn't have any kind of internet browser on it?
I don't care if I might need to buy an older generation of one.

AFAIK, most pre-2011 Sony PRS readers  don't have Wifi. For a list of models, see this Wikipedia topic. (Search the list of discontinued models.)


How can I read my epub books on the kobo app on my computer? I have an e-reader (Kobo Touch) where I have downloaded my ebooks in epub format. How can I read those books on the Kobo desktop app?

Attributed to ebookfriendly.com:

  Authorize your device with Adobe DRM

Kobo is using Adobe DRM to prevent ebook files from unauthorized distribution. You should be aware of it before you start buying books on Kobo.

If you don’t authorize the device with your AdobeID, you will be only able to read the book on a first device to which you download it. It won’t open on any other device.

The key to flexibility is to authorize any app and device with the same Adobe ID.

If you accept the limitations Adobe DRM puts on a user, follow these steps:

Get Adobe ID. It’s a combination of the email address and a password you’ll use after signing up on Adobe site.
Authorize with your new credentials any of the devices/apps you use. Do it before you download the first ebook. Here is a tip on how to authorize a computer and your mobile devices with Adobe ID credentials.

  Back up Kobo books to a computer

The books you bought are stored on a device you use to read them. They can also be synced between devices.

How to get all of them to a computer? You can use Adobe Digital Editions application for that. There are versions for PC and Mac computers.

Again, make sure to authorize the computer with the same AdobeID, otherwise you won’t be able to open the books.

In Adobe Digital Editions, look for the command saying “Authorize” (Help menu). Type in your AdobeID.
Go to Kobo store, sign in and go to My Library. You’ll see here a list of all the books or book samples you downloaded from Kobo.

To download the book, click on the turquoise button on the right. ”Adobe DRM Epub” means the book has DRM and you’ll be able to open it only with ADE. “Download Epub” means the book is unprotected, so any epub reading application will open it.

The blog goes on with a number of collected links to other resources, including other blogs and videos, for specific importing steps for a number of readers. See those links at the bottom of the page at ebookfriendly.com.


Dedicated ebook reader? I'm looking for a device that allows me to read ebooks, but I don't want it to do much, if anything, else. So something that has a dedicated ebook reading design and functionality (so for example not the Nexus 7 or an iPad), what are my options?

Additional requirements: Supports reading my own PDFs and ePubs.

The device that you need is basically an e-ink ereader, all of them have the features that you have requested.

Since there are many different brands and models, each one with its own set of different features, I suggest you to take a look at the comparison page on Wikipedia, that has in one place all the informations that you need to make your choice; if you understand italian, also look on eBookReaderItalia (anyway it's just a table filled with tech specs, so even if you don't speak my language you should be able to understand it nonetheless).

There is also another comparison page on Mobileread wiki, but it is a bit outdated .


How or what coding format do I use? I'm wanting to change a book called Being and Nothingness by Paul Satre from pdf to something a phone app called UB reader will recognise, I am using calibre-ebook.com, but don't know which format to use, so far it's nothing but a mess. Or should I copy the entire book to Windows notepad, and then convert it from that? Please help, thank you.

If you are referring to this website: http://www.mobisystems.com/android/ub-reader/ for the UB reader app you mention in your question; then they state on their homepage that the:

Universal Book Reader is a stylish and user-friendly eBook reading app for Android.
UB Reader provides a comfortable reading experience for Android smartphones and tablets, allowing you to read EPUB and PDF files - DRM-protected and otherwise. An integrated file browser allows you to quickly add any eBook stored on your device, over email, or through the Feedbooks.com online store.

So if you have the content in an EPUB or PDF format you should be good.
From a professional production standpoint Calibre is not recommended, there are a lot of validation and poor coding standards used by Calibre.
Therefore converting it in InDesign or possibly professionally having the epub converted is advised.
InDesign should have no issues creating an ePub correctly. Be sure to export the fonts correctly though to avoid font licensing issues.


What is the formula for converting a 10 digit ISBN to a 13 digit ISBN? I didn't see this question here yet so I thought I would ask if someone has the formula for converting a 10 digit ISBN to a 13 digit ISBN and vice-versa.  I know there are several sites that offer conversion such as ISBN.org from Bowker and a few spreadsheets that have macros for it but someone might find the formula useful.

Wikipedia gives it as

Remove the ISBN 10 check digit from the end
Add 978 to the front
Add the ISBN-13 check digit to the end

The check digit is calculated as per Wikipedia

Take each digit as an element in in an array x_ i.e. the ith digit i the ISBN is x_i e.g. x4 is the 4th digit.
Multiply the even digits by 3 and sum these.
add these to the sum of the odd digits
find the remainder mod 10
subtract from 10 (you have a number 1-10)
This is the result as a number between 1 and 10, unless the figure is 10 then the result is 0

x_13 = (10 - (x_1 + 3x_2 + x_3 + 3x_4 + ... + x_11 + 3x_12) mod10 ) mod 10


How can I use pdftk to make changes to my PDF ebooks? There are answers by asalamon74 (here), and by anthon (here, here and here), that use pdftk.

I don't think I have pdftk installed on my ebook reader¹. How and where do I install it, and once installed how can I use it?

¹ This Q&A was inspired by this comment, which essentially could have been the above question. I did not find it appropriate to clobber each and every of my answers with installation and usage instructions for people that cannot seem to find those instructions using a search engine. Imagine the bloat that we would have if every answer with a reference to Calibre, Word or Open/Libre-office would have multiple paragraph about how to install such an application on each possible platform.

pdftk, the PDF toolkit, is a program that has been around since 2004, and is available for multiple platforms: Windows, Linux, OSX. Although you could probably compile (it is open source) and run it on some (Android based) ebook readers, it is more intended to be run on your main computer, to change files before loading them onto your ebook reader.
pdftk can do a lot of things out-of-the-box: collate scanned PDF pages (including handling reverse ordered back sides); decrypt and encrypt PDFs; joining and splitting of PDFs; removing of pages; rotating (90° increments) of pages; reporting on PDF metatdata and bookmarks.
pdftk is built on top of the iText java library. It's development history is documented by its revision history.
Installation
Windows
For Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8), use the installer that you can get directly from the pdftk pages at PDF Labs. Run the executable installer, you should select the option [Don't create a Start Menu Folder]², but make sure you leave [Add application directory to your environment path] selected.
Now you can open the Command Prompt (in the "Accessories" program group) and type³:
pdftk --version

to make sure the program is correctly installed. You can now use the examples provided in the answers that were mentioned in the question.
OSX
You can download the Mac OS X installer (for Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion) from pdftk pages at PDF Labs, or use homebrew-cask as explained in this StackOverflow answer:
brew cask install pdftk

After that, open a Terminal and type
pdftk --version

to make sure the program is correctly installed. You can now use the examples provided in the answers that were mentioned in the question.
Linux
Most Linux distributions include pdftk, try
sudo apt-get install pdftk

or
sudo yum install pdftk

or pick another installer appropriate to the distribution.
After installation, open a terminal (if not already open for the installation process) or switch to a console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and type:
pdftk --version

to make sure the program is correctly installed. You can now use the examples provided in the answers that were mentioned in the question.
Usage
pdftk is not hindered by a graphical user interface, therefore it is easy to automate repetitive tasks⁴. The examples in the answers, e.g.:
 pdftk *.pdf cat output ../combined.pdf

(to combine multiple PDF files in one file), can be copied and pasted from your web browser into your command prompt/terminal.
To find out about other easy ways to manipulate your PDF files, try:
pdftk --help

or have a look at the manual pages.
When in a hurry, and only having to do things once, it is sometimes easier to burst a while PDF into individual pages with:
pdftk in.pdf burst

then remove the pages you don't need anymore, or rearrange them by renaming them, and then combine them using:
pdftk pg_*.pdf cat output out.pdf

(this combines the pages in alphabetical order so if you want the original page 2 to go after page 3, just rename pg_0002.pdf to pg_0003a.pdf).
¹ If you don't mind doing repetitive tasks moving a mouse around, there is also a GUI based version of the program: PDFtk Free
² That only creates a superfluous entry in the Program menu with an Uninstall option, you can do that from the "Add/Remove Programs" in the Control Panel
³ If you are not familiar with using the commandline: you have to type the characters shown and at the end of the line press Enter
⁴ For instance by calling it from a batch file, a shell script or (my favourite) a Python program


Transferring books between Kindles If I buy a newer and more complete Kindle reader than the one I'm using at present, how can I move my books from one reader to the other?

When you connect the new device to your account, you will be able to see all of the existing books in your library. You can then download whichever ones you want to have on the new device.


How do I upload an ebook I have an e-book I want to publish free, ideally I want it published on Amazon
but happy to follow the trail to get that done. Can anyone tell me the steps needed to achieve this.

Not trying to discourage you from trying this, but you might find that starting with a WORD document takes up MUCH more time than you thought due to the complexity of setting it up, which is why I write in Markdown and convert that directly to EPUB with software I wrote.You really should try Sigil (free) or Calibre (free), they are both free, can make an EPUB, which you can then upload to Amazon, Smashwords, or somewhere else.


cover size issue with pandoc (markdown to epub) (when viewing on Kobo) I am using pandoc to create EPUB files from markdown files to read the EPUB on my Kobo. It works well except with the cover which is not displayed at the proper size.

Here is the cover image:

Here is the result:

Here is the command I use to create the book:

pandoc first.md second.md --epub-cover-image=cover.png -o ebook.epub

The cover image dimensions are: width: 1600 px; height: 2400 px
following recommendations here:

https://www.adazing.com/ebook-cover-dimension-sizes-and-free-dimension-template/

But size is still weird with other dimensions.
I wish it would auto-resize.

Any idea how to fix it ?

Unless I am mistaken I hacked a fix for this at some point by (1) unzipping the epub and (2) running a sed one-liner that edited the html to embed the image in an adhoc <svg> tag so it automatically resized to the size of the screen and (3) zipped back the epub. Doesn't matter any more in any case because shortly afterwards I opened a ticket with pandoc-discuss asking the developers to add this enhancement to pandoc's next release … Which they did! Since this was over a year ago IIRC… current stable pandoc release should have it…


Alternative to Kobo to solve line wrapping problem I was given a Kobo as a gift.  I like the idea of reading a book on an electronic device because I'd like to be able to click and see a definition of a word that I'm not familiar with, rather than going to look for the dictionary.

However, I'm unhappy with the width of the device.  Unless I make the font very small, every line is getting wrapped/carried to the next line.  Example:

I suppose I either need a format of book that will allow for fluid display of the text, or I need a larger device.

I would like to read pdfs as well as books.  I don't like two-column pdfs, where I have to page-down to follow the whole left-hand column, and then jump up to the right-hand column.

I also own a Kobo ereader.

From what I can see, the rather messy output that you get is probably caused by a badly formatted ebook file, being it .pdf or .epub. It is just a supposition, but I really think that this layout is not your ereader fault. If this is really the case, there is not much you can do about it, other than trying to find a better version of the file.

You can do a quick test by downloading a properly formatted ebook file (i.e. this freely available version of Dracula) and seeing if you keep having this problem.

Ereaders are mainly intended to be used with reflowable text ebook formats, like .azw for Amazon Kindle and .epub for the rest of the world; when acquired from legitimate sources, they are usually properly formatted.
Even if ereaders support the .pdf format, it is mainly for the sake of completeness, it is a format mainly used for fixed layout pages and is not really suited to be read from a small screen; whenever you can you should rely on the above-mentioned formats.


What does it mean that a pdf is "paginated"? I have quite often seen written somewhere that pdf is (or isn't) paginated. Maybe this term is used for other formats, too.

I thought that this is used to pdf where page numbering in the file corresponds to the page numbers in the actual document. (To explain in layman's terms, if it as book and the frontmatter is numbered as i-xiv and the rest of the book is numbered 1-400, then when I try to go to page number 1 in the viewer, it goes to the first page of the book, not the first page of the frontmatter.)

But I have also seen this post on another SE site. The answer given seems to indicate that non-paginated pdf would mean that it is a file which consists only of single very long page.

To clarify the things:

  What is the meaning of the term paginated pdf-file. If both usages mentioned above are correct, which of them is more common?

I have never heard it used to mean either of those things. In my experience, if someone says a PDF is paginated, they simply mean that there are page numbers on the PDF's pages. They may or may not correspond to some other publication, like a physical book. The point is simply that the pages have numbers on the pages themselves.


Can Kobo read Hebrew ePubs? I noticed Kobo eReader does not have Hebrew in pre-installed languages. Can kobo read Hebrew ePub properly?

Kobo eReaders have two reading engines:

Adobe RMSDK (epub2)
ACCESS NetFront (epub3)

The ACCESS NetFront epub3 engine supports RTL text in epub3 books with a .kepub extension. Depending on the model/firmware, you might have to embed/install Hebrew fonts. For more information also see this website.

You also might want to check out the Mobileread Kobo forum for more detailed information.

tl;dr The answer is yes, but you'll most likely have to convert epub2 books to epub3 books and change the file extension to .kepub. (You also might have to embed/install Hebrew fonts.)


How to improve image heavy mobi format book? I am fairly new to ebook world and written a book which has many images, but I am afraid it will increase the size of the book in mobi format as well(currently I am in Docx)

I know that amazon provides text book creator for image heavy books. but will it have any other impact on my book? Have someone used this software previously?

is there any other way to publish an efficient image heavy book in amazon?

Reduce the size of the images using a tool such as free IrfanView or an alternative. If you simply drop an image into a word processor such as LibreOffice Writer or MS Word, and then drag a corner to shrink the image to fit the page, the number of bytes used by the image stays the same. Pre-shrink the image to the approximate size needed in the page layout.
If you have many images, you can batch process some to a set size with image editors.
BTW, MOBI files are often twice the size of EPUB, so consider other formats for non-Kindle devices, if file size is an issue.


Is there a standardized or recommended image format, size, and resolution when embedding images? I would like to embed images into my ebook, but I could not find any general references that describe "best practices" related to image format, size and resolution.

Are there any standardized or recommended guidelines or references that describe what file format (Jpeg, PNG, BMP, etc.), what size (minimum/maximum Width and/or Height), and what resolution (minimum/maximum DPI) would be able to be handled by most ebook readers? I am thinking along the lines of "agreed industry standards", if any…

The short answer is no, and I don't expect there to be anything like that with a single recommendation.

The reason is that different input material is better rendered in different image file formats. All material handles well in non-lossy formats (among others most of the TIFF formats, PNG), however such format produce large files. When you look at space saving compressed formats, photos handle well in JPEG, and images of scanned text are best represented in DjVu.

My own experience from scanning mangas drawn on paper (so my daughter can take them on her ebook) are that for that, JPEG is a good format and that I best convert the scan to the physical dimensions of her reader. This gives optimal size of the files. And because of the interpolation that is done on the computer vs the one on the device is of better quality, it looks better and is faster in displaying.
I noticed this when I had generated her drawings in EPUB form for my reader (with a higher resolution) and then read the same EPUB on hers. The images are combined in a simple EPUB file with the stylesheets setting borders to 0. (I do all calculations for that in pixels, not bothering with physical sizes and resolution, which in the end resolves to the same).


Annotation of non-Amazon books on Kindle Paperwhite What I know: Using e.g., Calibre, I can put E-Books which I bought in other stores than Amazon onto a Kindle Paperwhite (2013). Also, the Paperwhite supports PDF reading.

My Question is: Can I annotate this non-Amazon originating content on the Paperwhite? I ask for both file types, converted E-Books (transferred via Calibre to the Kindle), as well as PDFs (not specifically converted).

Update 2018:
Got an epub book? Best way at the moment for most qualiity and support is renaming to .txt (or png?) and sending to kindle email adress with convert subject (doesn t even need convert subject here? ;  anyway better than calibre mobi conversion way). This way (direct) epub conversion is supported although it s officially not.

TL;DR (today's environment)

Yes, you can annotate (pdf and azw...)
Yes, on formats like azw.. (you can convert via amazon upload "convert" as email subject; or calibre) you can extract your annotations via clippings.txt on kindle paperwhite, or by sharing it around your devices (amazon upload) and export with android kindle app.
No, using pdf, getting the annotations outside seems to be difficult, you can annotate though, but for me without being able to extract them, this is a bit sensless (there are also no normal pdf annotations, like you know from adobe reader). As PDFs are the onle way for some documents (magzines, math formulars?) this is annoying. Any solution is appreciated!
For Amazon bought books just use: read.amazon.com/kp/notebook (or the azw... possibility explained above)

As I'm highly interested in reading PDFs on my kindle paperwhite 3 (the recent one), as I want a perfect reading experience (eInk/no bright display and high resolution) and the kindle paperwhite gives me that. I experimented with my kindle fire and my paperwhite, so far my insights for the kindle paperwhite are (they correspond to todays possibilities, when something changes, feel free to comment):

You can annotate converted ebooks and pdfs
The problem is how to get the annotations outsite of the kindle paperwhite

There seem to be 3 factors:

Which software version (kindle) do you have?
How did you transfer the data to your ebook (by usb or by amazon uploading)?
Which format do you use (pdf or epub or azw...)?

The software version decides how the notes are stored on the kindle. It seems to be that in earlier version notes where stored in an "mbp" file format, which could be read with the right software. But amazon changed that to "mpb1" (I don't know, if it is possible to read that). (I tested everything with today's recent kindle version 5.8.10.)

The transfer type decides if your uploaded document (only the document, didn't say anything about annotations yet) is distributed to your devices. It is distributed if you upload it via amazaon (e.g. with send to kindle via email), with USB it is not.

The format decides if your annotations are synced around your devices. This obviously only works, if the document itself is synced (uploaded via amazon). So you need to upload it via amazon and use an kindle compatible book format to share your annotations (pdf won't work).

temp TL;DR:

If you want to just share your document around your devices (not annoations), use amazon uploading.
If you want additionaly to share the annotations also use amazon uploading but use a compatible file format (not pdf), easiest way is, writing "Convert" as the subject when sending the file via email uploading.

Sadly: https://read.amazon.com and also https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook? (shows your annotations in the browser) won't work with that methods (also the windows kindle application!). They just work with amazon bought books, as I see it.

For me, this is very unsatisfactory as I don't just want to have the notes on the kindle reader app or on my kindle paper white, I want it to be on my pc! Reading app for pc would only be second best option, but as I said, it doesn't work like i said in the paragraph before.

So I experimented further.

paperwhite usb to pc: There are many formats, somebody may try to open these: .apnx, azw3f, azw3r, mbp1, mbs, pds, pdt. I didn't really, would be great if somebody finds out something.
open the clippings.txt under documents. There you can find the annotations of kindle books formats (azw... and so on, but not pdf) (can also be synced files),

Sharing the notations via kindle itself:

The sharing options on paperwhite are shit, you can only share a single annotation at a time, and you can share it with facebook and twitter - facepalm.
The sharing options with the android fire kindle app are good and much better. But this only works with formats like azw..., it does not work for pdfs.

The pdf annotation extraction/export seems to be difficult. This is very unsatisfactory for me, as some documents (math formulars?) and magazines can only be read properly as an pdf. I appreciate any solution in this area!


Kindle PaperWhite Page turn glitches I just got my new Kindle PaperWhite (Wifi). Every time I turn the page I see the screen glitch (some thing like blur) for fraction second irrespective whether the page has image or not. Is this in all the devices or could it be a factory defect? Or is there any settings to change it?

From the User's guide:

  Understanding Kindle display technology

  Your Kindle uses a high-resolution display technology called electronic paper. The
  display is  reflective, which means you can read it clearly even in
  bright sunlight. Electronic paper uses  ink just like books and
  newspapers, but it displays the ink particles electronically.

  On occasion, your screen may seem to flash. This is part of the
  process of updating the  e-reader display. By default, your Kindle
  features fast, smooth page turns, minimizing the  number of flashes.
  To refresh the page with every page turn, from the Home screen tap the
  Menu button and select Settings. Tap Reading Options and use the Page
  Refresh setting to  set your preference. For manga refresh settings,
  tap the Menu button when reading a manga  book and select the Page
  Refresh On/Off setting.

So, I guess it's common for all devices. My Paperwhite 2 has it too.


Cross-platform interactive ebook in iBooks Author I'm attempting to create a choose-your-own-adventure ebook in iBooks Author. However, in formats other than the mac store, the links do not work. I can export it as an epub but the links will only work in iBooks. How do I fix this?

This is a case where a very user-friendly tool works well on only one platform.

Before I say anything else, you should have learned how to create and edit links in HTML. Also, it might help to use css which allows you to force a new page. Sample code here: http://www.paulsalvette.com/2012/04/adding-page-breaks-for-your-kindle.html (Keep in mind that ebook support for page breaks has improved but is still lacking in Google play books).

Creating hyperlinks in HTML for epub files is extremely simple. Unfortunately ibooks author probably generates a lot of hard-to-edit code (I'm guessing).  If you can unzip the .epub (an epub is just a zip with its suffix renamed to epub), you can probably make those changes manually. But that might be a lot of trouble.

Actually if you're testing the links, you could probably test with Adobe Digital Editions or the Readium in Chrome

I don't know why you choose ibooks author, but you probably would have had more luck with creating your ebook in sigil. You need to test the html files before you make an epub file.

One thing. I am a gigantic fan of CYOA, but here are 2 things you should know:

"Choose your own adventure" is trademarked. I would call it a "maze story" which is not trademarked.  I think there are some bona fide CYOA stories as ebooks, but I think the publisher created an app to host those stories. (By the way, looking over the print CYOA is very interesting. you can appreciate the artistic choices. I blogged about the series here (skip down a bit)).
This author Rudolf Kerkhoven has created some interesting (and successful) maze stories in Kindle. Check out "The Adventures of Whatley Tupper"


How to move a word to the next line in Sigil I know how to move words on the same line, but I don't know how to move them to the next line in the code view.  When I move the word over on the same line,  I increase the left: numbers.  I want to move the word "A" to the next line to correct an error at the beginning of the page.  I can't figure out how to do this.

Thanks in advance,

Janis

If you want to create a hard line-break within a paragraph use
. For example:

First line
Second line

Alternatively, insert

. For example:

First line

Second line


How to convert tagged articles into a single ebook without losing tags for reading on kindle? We had 1000+ (quite lengthy) articles lying in our old computers in .doc (non-uniformly named) format in our organization. To make them accessible, We've taken the painful task of setting up a drupal site and posting all these articles with proper categorization and tags. It really enhanced the access. Now the situation demands me to read all these 1000+ lengthy articles, make notes, extract useful quotes, etc. It is really impossible for me to read these (a) on computer screen (b) in sequential order.

So I need to convert all these articles into an ebook. But I need to retain the utility of tags and categories. That is, somehow, in that ebook, I need the ability filter/view all the articles of a particular tag(s) or category. So that I'll read all articles of that category first and then move on to next category.

Is there a way to achieve it? If it isn't possible, suggest the best possible thing I can do. I need to some how get these to kindle, but I don't have a clue how?

Probably the best approach for this would be to treat each category as a chapter. The whole point of chapters in a book is to control the order in which a reader proceeds through the book. It sounds like you want to ensure that each category is read in a specific order, so your next step would be to decide just what that order should be.

If you still want to make use of any tags, then you will want to convert those to html anchor tags, which will also be used for each category (chapter). When all is finished, you could have a full Table of Contents (your list of categories), as well as a directory of tags. This will probably require some additional work in converting the content and getting it formatted properly, but it is definitely doable.

If you decide you would like to tackle this on your own, I strongly recommend using Guido Henkel's guide to formatting. It's a nine-step process that takes you through very detailed instructions on how to create a properly formatted e-book, including how to create a Table of Contents. He will also explain the free tools you will need, such as Notepad++ and Calibre. I used this to create my first e-book four years ago, and it is still the same process I use now, with nearly forty titles published.

This guide can be used by anyone, but it would be a lot easier if you already have a basic understanding of html. It isn't required though, because he does an excellent job of explaining everything and taking you through the process step-by step. If you find this to be too daunting, then your best approach would be to find someone to format it for you.


Only select from files on SD card in BookEen Odyssey When I insert a SD card in my Bookeen Odyssey which contain my study Books, the titles show up mixed with my 'pleasure' books on the internal memory of the bookreader.

I can add "AA" before the book title or author name and make sure they are sorted together, but maybe there is a better way of organising that I missed?

In the Folder View, you can select the folder view, which probably gives you Cybook/.../ etc. at the top. Then select the parent directory in the top-left corner of the display repeatedly until you see a Cybook and an SD icon. The top will read Library.

Select SD and after that navigate to the books in the (sub)folder on your SD card.

(If you happen to switch on folder view while reading a book from your SD card, you will already 'be' in a directory on your SD card, and you will  not have Cybook at the beginning of your directory path).

Also see the question Where can I see the books that are stored in my SD card?


How does DRM impact the sales of eBooks? DRM (Digital rights management) is a somewhat controversial anti-piracy measure.  There are strong arguments on both sides of the debate, this question is not about the should/shouldn't debate.  It just about sales, does DRM have any impact on sales?

Are there any studies indicating an impact on sales based on the presence or absence of DRM on ebooks?

There was a study1 done by Laurina Zhang about the effects of DRM on music sales. In her conclusion1 she states:

  My analysis in this paper, based on a large representative sample of
  albums from all four major record companies, sheds light on this
  question. I find that the removal of DRM increases digital sales by
  10%.

While this does not directly address the eBook industry, it does suggest that DRM may also have a negative impact on sales of Ebooks.

1Warning: Links directly to pdf.


Different copyright notices on printed and digital versions of a book What are the implications of having the digital version of a thesis carry a licence that differs from that of its printed copy deposited in a library?

I am distributing my thesis online under a CC license, but when the printed version was first deposited at the university library I had included a "All rights reserved" notice. I am now unable to change the printed version at the library, so the digital copy that is online and the printed copy at the library carry two different copyright notices.

Do you envisage any problem other than the readers of the printed copy not knowing that they could also copy and distribute portions of the thesis with attribution?

The rights are personal to you. The consequences are more practical than legal. For example, a reader of the library copy can copy a portion of your text if such use constitutes "fair use." Whether a use is permitted under the copyright law is often a close question. In general, short quotations are permitted. Copying an entire chapter is not. Failure to attribute a quote is more of an academic or journalistic crime; proffering a quote as your own is not a violation of copyright, it's plagiarism. You, as rightsholder, own the intellectual property in the text. You can sell it, or give it away (as in a CC license). For example, you could sell the copyright to your thesis and the buyer could then decide to give the thesis away. You could sell some rights (say, audiobooks) and retain others (digital editions). If you have licensed your content under Creative Commons, the existence of a printed book that predated the grant does not affect the grant or make the grant unenforceable. This answer is grounded in US law. Other countries may or may not recognize the principle of fair use.


How to create Pocketbook logo? I have two images in logo folder preinstalled in ebook (Pocketbook 612).

Well, I take them and see this information.

> identify 1_st.bmp
> 1_st.612.bmp BMP 600x800 600x800+0+0 8-bit PseudoClass 256c 481KB 0.000u 0:00.010

Next, I try to create same formatted images with convert utility of imagemagick and with gimp.

Convert utility

I use this command to create images:

 convert Ah.jpg -resize \!600x800 -colorspace Gray -depth 8 -type palette Ah.bmp

And identify check:

> identify Ah.bmp
> Ah.bmp BMP 600x800 600x800+0+0 8-bit PseudoClass 256c 508KB 0.020u 0:00.030

But book says: unsupported format

GIMP

I try to create pictures by gimp, cut them to size 600x800 and use grayscale mode.

And identify check:

  identify Oh.bmp
  Oh.bmp BMP 600x800 600x800+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 1.44MB 0.000u 0:00.010

Again, book says: unsupported format

Also, I rename pictures with suffix .612 (Oh.612.bmp) but this method doesn't work too.

Could anybody help me?

I met with same problem on my Pocketbook 912, and after some time I figured out how to solve it. BMP should be in indexed color mode and without compression. ImageMagick by default producing RLE compressed bmp.
For indexed palette I am using default logo image 1_st.912.bmp.

So if you have image with right resolution you can do this:

$ convert someimage.png \
    -background white \
    -alpha remove \
    -depth 8 \
    -colors 256 \
    -type grayscale \
    -remap 1_st.912.bmp \
    -dither FloydSteinberg \
    -compress none  BMP3:outlogo.912.bmp

Here's another example, how I converted OpenBSD's puffy to pocketbook logo.

$ wget -O Puffy.gif http://www.openbsd.org/art/puffy/puf800X689.gif # download image
$ convert Puffy.gif \
    -background white -gravity center -extent 825x1200  \
    -alpha remove -depth 8 -colors 256 -type grayscale \
    -remap 1_st.912.bmp -dither FloydSteinberg -compress none \
    BMP3:puffy.912.bmp

This command will resize canvas, center original image and convert it to supported by pocketbook bmp file. Note: since you have other resolution, you should change 825x1200 string to your device's resolution.


How to handle formatted text examples in book content? I am preparing a book for print that includes many (60+) examples of formatted text (indentation is used for a specific purpose in the method that the book describes and a different font helps set the examples apart from the body of the book.)

Originally, I planned to make all of the examples into image files to solve this problem, but found that did not work well for the print version.  So gave up and decided on two separate source files, one for print and one for Kindle.

Now I'm wondering if there is any better way of handling formatted text (indentation, different font) in the Kindle world, before I generate a sizable number of image files.

Can anyone point me in a direction of some information that might be useful?

Thanks for your help...

The Kindle formatting Guide (downloadable PDF) is a good source of information. Google it.

Using Images to display text is a NO! NO! (Explaining why would take several paragraphs).

It sounds as though you don't have a lot of experience with using CSS with HTML. That might be a problem. This isn't something you could do easily with a MS Word to epub conversion.

I would recommend Paul Salvette's ebook The eBook Design and Development Guide about doing these kinds of things. A little out of date, but still good information.  (Liz Castro's book is also great, but it was written early on and she had to create lots of kludgy workarounds to make things work. You no longer need those things).

Here's his tutorial about formatting/indenting/paragraphing
http://www.paulsalvette.com/2012/04/indents-margins-and-alignment-for.html

You probably want to look at some boilerplate css for ebooks.

Here's Salvette's http://bbebooksthailand.com/bb-CSS-boilerplate.html


Is it more difficult to sideload books on to a Kindle Fire than other devices? I am considering a Kindle Fire, there is a review on Project Gutenberg suggesting it is needlessly (or intentionally) more complex to sideload free works on to a Fire.  In a comment to an answer on If I buy a Kindle Paperwhite do I have to get books from Amazon? a link to this article suggests it is really not that difficult.

Is the Kindle Fire more difficult to sideload to?

The Kindle Fire is not difficult to sideload to--at any rate, the 1st generation version that I have is trivially easy: just plug the Fire into the computer with a micro USB cable, it shows up as a drive, and drag .mobi files into the relevant folder on the Fire. Easy!


Are DRM location sensitive? It is quite frequent that a book available for sale in North America
is not available in Europe, and conversely. However, it is quite legal
to buy a book on one continent and to carry it with you when you move
or travel to another continent, even when it cannot be legally sold on this other continent. When the book is a hard copy, or a
DRM-free ebook, this raises no problem, and you are free to read the book anywhere

My question is: what happen when the book is shackled in DRM? Will the
DRM be location sensitive and disallow you to read some books when you
are not in an area where it is legally sold, and particularly to read
your books from a new device.

For example, can I travel to America, buy there a DRMed ebook not sold in
Europe, return to Europe and then load this ebook on my ereader.

Of course the answer could depend on the kind of DRM, or possibly on
the publisher or on some organization in charge of the DRM control.

I am looking for information or references on this issue, especially for
the major DRM systems currently in use.

tl;dr This depends on what you mean by DRM, but generally the answer is no.
Overview
DRM can mean a lot of things, but it's basically a combination of software, file formats, and, in somewhat rare cases, the hardware itself. Unless the hardware and the software have some way to figure out where you are, they can't do anything differently based on your location.
So, unless your reader is checking its IP address against a geolocation service, using a GPS device built into the hardware, or doing something very similar to one of these techniques, it has no way of knowing where you are. All of these techniques have problems, and all tend to lead to bad user experience.
There are circumstances where this kind of DRM might make sense. For example, an intelligence agency might create its own software, file format, and region-based DRM to prevent people from accessing certain files outside of certain locations. (This is probably not the best idea, for various reasons, but it could be done.) But a mass-market maker of consumer devices might consider this a likely PR and customer-relations disaster-in-the-making, so you would expect them to avoid it.
It's worth pointing out that you could avoid such DRM by simply turning off internet for your device or putting it in airplane mode. If it still detected its location and disabled a book you had purchased, you would then know it was secretly transmitting, despite you telling it not to do so. This is the kind of thing that doesn't typically go over well when it hits the press, so it's unlikely anyone would try it.
A Side Note about DVDs and Region-Based DRM
DVDs famously use a region-based DRM scheme, in which every DVD player and every DVD has one or more codes. Each code corresponds to a region of the world. Unless the DVD and the player have at least one code in common, the player will refuse to play the DVD. But here's the critical thing: those codes are hard-coded in the discs. Most devices allow you to change it, but only a small number of times (like 7). And neither the disc nor the device will automatically change its code when you move them. So, even this DRM scheme is not an automatic one like you're asking about. It's also worth pointing out that the market for bootlegged movies is generally much bigger than the market for even the best-selling books. The economic analysis is very different.
Conclusion
I have never heard of a DRM for ebooks that varies by geography automatically. That does not mean it doesn't exist, but I'd be surprised if any publicly-available readers did use such a technology.


Where can I source images for ebooks that are not restricted by reproduction limits nor dpi? As you are probably aware, most image vendors restrict you to the number of reproductions you can make using their images. Many have additional licenses that you can purchase, but they are often exorbitantly priced (specially if you need to use many images-like myself). They also generally have some form of size restriction such as don't use images over 72dpi.

Question

Where can I source images for ebooks that are not restricted by reproduction limits nor restricted to 72 dpi?

UPDATE

I don't mind paying for images as long as the prices aren't exorbitant.

MY OWN RESEARCH

Flikr allows you to search specifically for content that is ok for commercial use and is licensed under the creative commons licence. http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?

It depends from the type of images you need, but I'd suggest to have a look at openclipart. Its great advantage, besides containing images with an open license, is that they are stored in vectorial format (SVG), so they may be scaled at will.


Find new books in Adobe Digital Edition - library is there any way to browse available Adobe Digital Editions books? I would like to download some but do not exactly know what I am looking for and some sort of a library would be good.

ADE is not a library, it is software to allow a person to read ebooks. Here are sources for free ebooks if that's what you want:

http://www.gutenberg.org
http://smashwords.com
http://manybooks.net
Free classics on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2245146011
Baen free library, mostly scifi and fantasy. http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012
DDG search for free ebooks
Kobo free ebooks


Do I need an Amazon account to use a Kindle? I am looking to buy a Kindle Paperwhite (7th gen).  Do I need an Amazon account for it to work? I just want to put books on it from my PC.  I cannot create an Amazon Account because I have no credit card, so will my Kindle register without it?

You don't need a credit Card to register your amazon account.
With amazon account, it is much easier to send your personal books to your kindle:

send books an an attachment to your personal amazon email
Use browser extensions to send webpage directly to your kindle

Alternatively you can send books via USB cable to your kindle without using an account.


Is the Triton eInk display a viable option for future ereaders? The new Triton display by eInk Technologies allows eInk screens to display color. This would be very useful for features like images and highlighting. Is it a viable option for mainstream ereader displays? Specifically,

Does it significantly lower battery life?
Does it affect reading quality (e.g. blurrier or more artifacts)?
Would it require too much of a price increase?

An answer from someone who has an Ectaco Jetbook Color would be very helpful.

The Triton display is an E Ink display so it should greatly reduced power consumption when compared to a conventional LCD display. According to the E Ink website the Triton display has a similar crispness as an monochrome E Ink display. The price for the Ectaco Jetbook Color using this display is $499.95. However the price of future color E Ink displays could decrease.


Remove Kindle special offers as a gift I found a deal on a Kindle with special offers that I want to send to someone for a gift. I don't have access to their Amazon account. Can I send them something like a voucher to remove (or just outright remove) the special offers for that Kindle for their account, without having access to their account? Is there some other way to remove the offers from the device without having access to their account? It's a Kindle Voyage, if it matters.

No. To remove the special offer, you have to login to Amazon and chat with its support.

Step 1

Change the account owner to your friend. I don't have my kindle around, but you can find this option by navigating through the buttons in kindle.

Step 2

Ask them to negotiate with Amazon. They are supposed to take away the special offer for free. They did try to charge, but backed off after I insist.


Adding a language that Calibre does not recognize I want to add languages that Calibre does not have in its database, such as Farsi (an alias for "Persian") and Hindavi (the precursor to Urdu and Hindi), so that I can use those languages in the Languages field for books. Is there any way to do that?

Farsi

Speakers of Persian (and related languages) usually use Farsi in their native languages to refer to Persian in the same way a French speaker would use Français to refer to French. However, no French speaker would ask a software developer to use Français also in English GUIs.

If you want to have Farsi as a menu option, you'll need to change the UI language to Persian or a related language.

Hindavi

Since Calibre uses ISO language codes internally and there are no ISO codes for Hindavi/Hindustani, it's not possible to add a Hindavi menu option. You'll have to use Hindi.


How do I import an EPUB e-book into my Kindle? How do I import an EPUB (.epub) e-book into my Kindle considering that file format is not native to Kindle's?

I figured it out as I had not received an answer:

Download the open-source Calibre e-book management software from
here.
Once it's installed, open Calibre and add an EPUB e-book to its
library by clicking on the "Add books" button.
After you have added the e-book to the Calibre library, select it,
and then click the "Convert books" button.
This will open a new window with a few options and formats to
convert to.
Select ".MOBI" for the format.  This is important because .MOBI is
compatible with Kindle unlike .EPUB.
Once you've converted it, you can plugin your Kindle and use Calibre
to send the .MOBI e-book version to your Kindle so you can read it
there.


Software recommendation for writing ebook and exporting to multiple formats I am thinking about writing and/publishing an ebook with the following in mind:

It will contain code (needs proper formatting)
I should be able to publish PDF and EPUB versions
I might need to have an HTML version of the book too

Since I am new to this stuff, I wonder if anyone could give me some points on which software (free/paid) I should use for writing/formatting the ebook.

I have used LaTeX about 8 years ago, and I really liked it, but I am not sure if I can export to the formats I want with LaTeX.

Pandoc is your friend here.

Pandoc can take your input file (LaTeX, markdown, other) and transform it to PDF, EPUB, HTML (and many more).

Pandoc is cross-platform and free under the GPL, although donations are appreciated.

With regards to formatting your code, both LaTeX and markdown have components that will help.  LaTeX has many more layout options.

I've used both LaTeX and markdown to produce ebook (ePub) files.  An example of using pandoc with LaTeX is shown in another ebooks.stackexchange.com question I posted.

It's great to have a range of options.


Book length indicator for Kindle Paperwhite firmware 5.7.2.1 My Kindle Paperwhite has been updated (automatically) to firmware 5.7.2.1

In the old firmware the length of the book was indicated by the number of dots below the book title. Bold dots indicated my reading process:

  ..............

In the new firmware nothing indicates the length  of the book, only the following is printed:

  42% READ

Is there a way to change back to the old style? I really liked the way it showed the relative length of the books.

After lots of complaints the dots were brought back in the latest 5.8.1 firmware update for PW2 and PW3 Kindles, which you might need to manually download from the Amazon website.

(You can only downgrade to a previous version, if your Kindle had the latest jailbreak installed.)


Which size is taken into account by Amazon when calculating the download fees I get two very different sizes for my ebook in mobi format and, before publishing it, would like to know which size is the one which is taken into account by Amazon for calculating the download fees they charge under the 70% royalties option:

When compiling the file with kindlegen, I get the following sizes:

Approximate Standard Mobi Deliverable file size :   0002805KB
Approximate KF8 Deliverable file size :   0002817KB

Now, when I look on my harddisk, I see a mobi file of 11.5MB

Which is the one I'd have to pay for ?

You might find this article https://www.52novels.com/from-the-ebook-formatting-files-why-is-my-mobi-file-so-huge/ and this post to be helpful. How can I reduce the resolution of images in an epub or mobi file?

From the first article:

  Amazon understands this is unfair. After all, it prefers high-quality ebooks that play nicely with the various Kindle ereading systems.Rather than penalize authors and publishers for making beautiful full-featured ebooks, it calculates the delivery fee based on the smallest version which is usually the KF7 version. You can verify this by checking the Rights & Pricing page at your KDP Bookshelf.


Possible to transfer Adobe Digital Edition ePUB books from my local library to my Kindle? I recently purchased a Kindle Paperwhite. My local library provides books in a variety of formats, ePUB and Kindle being 2 of them. For the Kindle I was able to transfer them without much effort to my Paperwhite.

However for the ePUB formatted books I had to download Adobe Digital Edition to download the books. Once I had the ePUB file on my Mac OSX laptop I could not determine how to transfer this file to my Kindle.

Is this possible?

My research led me to 2 possible methods, one being to strip the DRM from the ePUB and then transfer the DRM free resulting PDF to the Kindle. The others methods were that it wasn't possible.

Is there a better alternative that doesn't require me to strip the DRM from the ePUB file?

Your Kindle cannot handle .epub files.

You could convert .epub to .mobi e.g. using Calibre, but this is only possible without DRM. There are also plugins to remove DRM, but using them is probably not legal in most jurisdictions.


Kindle paperwhite and sharing quotes with goodreads for side-loaded books I want to post quotes from my kindle paperwhite to goodreads but share button always disabled.

I tuned progress posting and finding books in goodreads using this question and I found information that quotes sharing available only for USA, Canada and Australia but I am from other country.

I try to find difference between amazon book from which I can post quotes and my sideloaded book from which I can't post quotes and I didn't find it.

Are there anybody who found the way to share quotes for sideloaded books?

This is a good, common question that seems to have an answer here: Trouble hooking up Goodreads with sideloaded ebook on Kindle Paperwhite

  I have found the best way to get it 100 percent working is this:

  If your book is not already in AZW3 format then convert it. (Has to be AZW3 and not just AZW.)
  Secondly, highlight the book and edit metadata.
  Once you are at that screen delete any other format that you have shown in the top right side leaving only AZW3.
  Delete the tags by hitting the recycle icon next to the tags box and hit download metadata.
  Once you have done that make sure the only tags you have are ISBN, Google, goodreads and amazon. You may not have all 4 but make sure
  that you do not have any mobi-asin tags.
  Save and download the quality check plug in for calibre.
  Highlight the book and click on the quality check icon at the top, look for 'fix' on the drop down menu and click 'fix asin for kindle
  fire'. Don't worry it will also work for paperwhite etc.
  Delete any copy you already have on the device and resend.
  For completeness I also go to the top of calibre and click device and update the cached metadata on device.
  Eject device and you should be good to go! Full integration with goodreads as if you had purchased through Kindle store.

Alternatively, try using the Quality Check tool:

  Get the Quality
  Check
  plugin for Calibre and then use it's "Fix -> Fix ASIN for Kindle Fire"
  feature. It expects that you have the Amazon ID in the book's metadata
  somewhere, which should be there if you download the metadata using
  Calibre. This inserts the ASIN and allows goodreads integration to
  work. I tested it myself.

  One annoying thing is that it seems that if the Kindle notices that
  there's a mobi-asin field (which the above introduces in order to
  fix Goodreads integration), then it seems to download and use the
  cover art that Amazon has for that book, instead of the one you set in
  Calibre. I'm not sure if there's a way to circumvent that.


What is the definition for "location" in a kindle eBook? I was navigating about this text I'm currently reading and I grew curious what exactly is meant by Loc or Location in the context of a kindle book. Is this essentially a word or character count?

If you look at the screen shot below I outlined in red the section of the UI that points out the text progress. There it states Page 14 × Loc 358 at the slider bar, and in the status bar 5% - Page 14 of 393 - Location 358 of 7091

According to the MobileRead Wiki, a location is 150 bytes.

  The Kindle uses an absolute position system named locations which are
  actually every 150 bytes in the file. Easy to generate accurately but
  are much smaller than a standard page so you get a range of numbers on
  every page. The exact formula is floor(bytes/150)+1, and note that
  this is bytes, not characters, and includes all the markup and tags in
  the mobi-html, not just the displayed text.


How do I add a cover (and other pictures) to my ePub? If I am creating an ePub file by hand, from scratch (following a recipe such as laid out in this question), how would I go about adding pictures to the file? In particular, is there anything special that I need to do for a cover image?

Images in general should be added just as they would be in HTML, with an <img> tag. The image files themselves should then be included in the OEBPS folder or a subfolder (I generally use a subfolder, personally). Each image file will need to be declared in the <manifest> section of the content.opf file. As mentioned in the epub 3.0 specifications, the cover image in particular should also have the cover-image property assigned to it in the <manifest>, like so:

<item id="cover_jpg" properties="cover-image" href="images/cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" />

The <manifest> entry for non-cover images is the same, just without the properties="cover-image" bit.

That's it for plain epub, but some retailers will also ask for a <meta> element in the <metadata> section of the content.opf file declaring the cover, like so (from Amazon's Kindle Publishing Guidelines):

<meta name="cover" content="images/cover.jpg" />

Note that Amazon in particular no longer requires the <meta> bit as long as the properties="cover-image" is correctly declared.


Are there any ebook libraries in the UK Are there any programs that allow library books to be checked out, as ebooks, specifically in UK?

NOTE: Based on this meta post and this question, I have created this UK version of the question.

In the UK you can (I suspect it depends on the county/borough) borrow ebooks from your public library.

They use Overdrive as I suspect many others do, so I think only do ePub readers(and only those that understand Adobe DRM), so no Kindles. Overdrive does do Kindles but only in the US.

See the entry page and you can browse without registering for the London Borough of Croydon


Ebook app for Windows 8 I am looking for recommendations for an ebook application that runs on Windows 8/8.1 .

You can try the good old ebook reader bundled with Calibre. It's a multiplatform software, so it's available for other systems too, not just for Windows. Besides being a great application (Calibre itself is the swiss army knife for all things related to ebooks), it's also free and open-source.

There is also EPUBReader, it's not a standalone program but a Firefox extension. Anyway I've never used it so I can't tell you much more than this.

Other available ereaders are those tied to online ebook stores, like Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and so on.


How do I make an ebook of sheet music? Someone has asked me to make an ebook of their music book (sheet music). What is the best file type to use? I am hoping that people will be able to see it on as many devices as possible. It is currently formatted as a PDF.

My recommendation is to keep it as a PDF and let people read it by using a PDF app on their tablet.

As long as you have a decent sized tablet (9 inches or more), PDFs can look superb. I don't know if scores have any special requirements for size.

Another option would be to use a fixed layout epub http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Fixed_layout_ePub

The easiest way to do that would be to purchase a one month license to Adobe Indesign, import your pdf into it and do any necessary formatting adjustments (One month licenses are cheap, but the learning curve is fairly steep).

Aha, I have forgotten to ask the key question: do you want to sell it? If yes and you want to do through Amazon, that is a whole different question (your only option would be a fixed layout epub for Kindle).

Even if you say yes, I would still just keep it as a pdf and upload it to smashwords and sell it there (they accept pdf files for selling).


Is there a way to convert an ePub page flip direction to rtl automatically? In other words, can you update the spine tag with a script instead of converting to zip, opening, and replacing?
Thanks.

Create an epub3 book or convert your existing epub2 book to an epub3 book and add a page-progression-direction="rtl" attribute to the <spine> tag in the content.opf file.

You can convert epub2 books to epub3 books with Calibre. (Polish books ▶ Upgrade book internals.)


CircularFLO doesn't apply styles for live text I do conversion with CircularFLO from .indd to .epub. The problem is that live text doesn't pick up styles. I have live text in my document but it is always Times New Roman. What am I missing?

See the picture in dropbox of live text, where the text loses its style and position. This picture using embedded text does not.

Please contact help@circularsoftware.com for free support.

The fonts used in your InDesign documents for live text must be TrueType or OpenType and must be active across the entire Mac and not just for InDesign.


how to secure documents with personal DRM Is it possible to secure my own documents with some kind of DRM so that they can only be read by a specific person?

You can encrypt the documents with a public key (e.g. from gpg) of the specific person. That will result in a document readable only by that specific person after decoding with her matching private key (only she possesses).


Disabling Ads on a Kindle with Special Offers If I get the Kindle with Special Offers can I upgrade to disable the ads? Would it cost more than just buying a Kindle without Special Offers?

From Amazon's help on Special Offers:

  Unsubscribe from Special Offers

  You can unsubscribe from Special Offers on your Kindle if you do not want to receive Sponsored Screensavers and Special Offers.

  Amazon is able to offer Kindle models at a subsidized price by delivering Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers. If you originally purchased a Kindle Special Offer Device you will be charged a one-time payment to unsubscribe from this service.

Last I checked, the one-time payment that was listed for me was the same as the original amount I saved by buying a With-Special-Offers device.


Is it possible to use Amazon Kindle without signing to a non-free unlimited cloud storage plan? I got used to "Send to Kindle" service to populate my Kindle with e-books from external sources. I can see the files in "Manage Your Content and Devices → Docs" section in my Amazon account.

Today (Mar 27, 2015) I received an e-mail from Amazon that states

  Your 5 GB plan is no longer available and has been replaced with a free 3-month trial of one of the Unlimited plans. Access to your existing files has not changed. You can continue to download and view your content. In order to upload new files you will need to pick one of the free 3-month trials.

I cannot find any information on whether I can continue to use the storage for free or I need to apply for some unlimited plan.

The Amazon Send to Kindle service has been around way before the Amazon Cloud Drive was introduced. Amazon automatically adds any personal documents sent through "send to kindle" to its cloud drive (which is included for Amazon Prime members and fire device owners).

This supplementary feature would not be anymore available without an Amazon Cloud Drive subscription. Nevertheless the actual send to kindle feature is not affected by this change and would still work without such an additional subscription. Some months after switching to the paid subscription, kindle documents aren't any longer included into the amazon cloud quota.

An extensive disucssion about this notification email and the resulting consequences can be found on mobileread.com


Changing screensaver images on Bookeen Odyssey I have tried to figure out how I can chance the screensaver image on by Bookeen Odyssey. The online FAQ says:

  Select the picture you want to set as screensaver and when the contextual menu appears confirm that you want to display this picture as screensaver.

I am not sure where to put the image and in what menu to select screensaver.

I have not tried, but I think you can put the image anywhere. I have put it in the internal memory in the Pictures directory. Particularly I did not want to risk finding out what happens when you put it on an SD card and remove the card.

To set it a file abc.jpg as screensaver. Select the file via the front Button and then Library (if you have folder view on, go all the way up the directory tree and then to Cybook → Pictures first).

As the picture you want is displayed, click the front button and then Menu.
Once the TAB Picture appears (top line Fit Screen) you are in the Picture context menu, there you have to scroll down. The last line—normally out of view—is 'Set as Screensaver`, make sure it is selected (✓).

You can have only one image as screensaver. Selecting another image, deselects the previous one.


Does something about DjVu prevent making a free viewer on iOS? Is there something about the technology and rights to the DjVu ebook format that explains why it's only available for iPhone by purchasing an app or by making an in-app purchase in a free app?

I saw somewhere that DjVu depends on the use of certain patents. Does that have something to do with it? Because on the other hand, the DjVuLibre software is offered as free open-source software under the GNU Public License.

I would guess that the rest of the software that a developer needs in order to create a free DjVu app for iPhone is present in ComicFlow, another item of free open-source software under the GNU Public License.

In my opinion the relative inaccessibility of DjVu's libdjvu, including having their own bytestream compression contributed to the low acceptance of the DjVu format over the years and not patent issues. This hinders other software developers adapting their software to support DjVu and even more so
when porting to a new platform.

The DjVuLibre software has several characteristics that make it difficult to port. It is C++ based code that builds on a framework that seems to be generically usable, but is probably DjVuLibre specific. I conclude that on not having encountered the framework anywhere else, as well as specific names of classes, etc. that include the substring DJVU) in the framework. That framework, in the form of libdjvu, is however used in all of the DjVuLibre tools (bzz. djvu...)

The libdjvu being a C++ library  makes it less portable and less accessible for being called from other languages (e.g. Python), than a C based library.

To complicate things, the bytestreams in the DjVu file format are compressed using a Burrows Wheeler encoder. The encoder is similar to bzip2 but has its own, DjVu specific, implementation. This gives a small advantage over more standard compression schemes, but this is dwarfed by the conceptual better handling of compression of the images through the use of wavelet encoding and individually compressed layers.

I analysed the DjVuLibre software some time ago, to extract OCR-ed text. I settled for a minimal Python implementation for that piece, as I could not get a Python program to hook up to the C++ libraries in a reasonable amount of time. I spent a few days getting the Python implementation to work, analysing the intransparent program flow of the library, all the while comparing the output with results from djvutxt and bzz. This resulted in the DJVU OCR extraction program included in Calibre. (The difficulties might be based on
my lack of programming experience: I have been programming C++ since the late 80's—one of the first commercial things I developed in C++  was a library  for creating GIF files in 1987—and have used Python since the mid 90's).

I must say I really like the DjVu concepts, and love the superior quality/filesize ratio, compared to scans in other file formats I have used. I always scan to .DjVu. But although I primarily work on a Linux system, the scanning/conversion process includes commercial software running on a Windows box that gives me even better compression results than the open DjVuLibre library does (as well as OCR without an additional program).