Kindle Kevin » Document Conversion

The Pragmatic Programmers Books are now available for Kindle

kevin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:43:52 +0000

If you’re a Kindle owner, and you also happen to be a programmer or technical enthusiast, you’re going to be excited to know that The Pragmatic Programmers have released many of their eBook versions of their print releases in .MOBI format, which the Kindle and Kindle 2 will very happily understand. The eBooks look great on the Kindle, so it seems like they actually put some effort into layout when they ported their content over to the new format, rather than a generic automatic conversion, which can have unyielding results with technical book layouts and images. If you’ve ever converted a PDF for viewing on the Kindle, you can agree that the experience isn’t completely flawless.

The Pragmatic Programmers offer books about Ruby, Ruby on Rails, iPhone development, high level programming concepts and techniques, and several other topics. They’re worth a gander if the topics interest you. Their eBook FAQ points out that they are continually converting their eBooks to the new formats and hope to have all of their offerings available in .MOBI soon.

With technical books starting to get visually formatted for eBook readers now, the Kindle is starting to make an excellent reference library. When Amazon releases the “Kindle Student” (presuming that’s what they would call it for an educational version), you can expect that more technical references will quickly become available.

Do you know of other technical book publishers who have recently made a Kindle or .MOBI format of their content? Share it with my readers by leaving a comment.

Excellent List of Kindle 2 Tips, Tricks, and Hacks

kevin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:25:12 +0000

iReaderReview has put up an excellent collection of tips, tricks, and hacks for the Kindle 2. Rather than attempt to build my own list, go check out their posting.

Excellent work guys!

Kindle 2 is hackable!

kevin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:48:16 +0000

Two brilliant guys have hacked the Kindle and Kindle 2.

The Kindle was first hacked a long, long time ago (December 2007) by Igor. He managed to use the Linux sources that Amazon is required to publish in order to figure out how things are setup in the firmware. Then he built a faux JTAG interface and was able to communicate to the device over a serial port. Lastly, he was able to login to the Kindle, revealing more about processes, ports, and other implementation details. This paved the way for the Kindle 2 hacks.

Recently, Jesse Vincent wrote on his blog about his efforts to hack the Kindle 2. He has discovered and written about the following:

An ePub to Unsecured Mobi converter.
Tether the Kindle 2 over USB to use your network’s Internet connection (this might be great for foreign folks, people on business trips, or spotty Whispernet coverage).
Custom firmware updates can be applied to the Kindle 2.

This is certainly exciting stuff! This will likely prompt Amazon to try to quickly respond, but the ability to add additional functionality to the device is certainly possible. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t looking for a convergence device, so we’d prefer to see an ability to extend features in the Kindle UI, but that will prove to be difficult unless Amazon opens up an SDK.

If you had the opportunity to add new features to the Kindle 2, what would they be?

Is Amazon’s automated document conversion service overloaded?

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:02:30 +0000

Yesterday, before I had the Kindle 2 in my hand, I set up my Kindle 2 in the “Manage Your Kindle” section in my Amazon account. I added some authorized email addresses so that I could email documents directly to the Kindle (with Amazon automatically converting them to the Amazon format of .AZW). Obviously I didn’t have my Kindle 2 yet, so I sent a test document to myusername@free.kindle.com, and I received an automatically converted Amazon Kindle file via a response email with the .AZW file attached.

This morning, I successfully transfered that file over to my Kindle 2 when it was connected to my MacBook Pro. The file looks great! The formatting is not perfect, but I’m willing to live with that for now.

However, tonight (February 24th, around 8:00PM PST) neither the myusername@kindle.com or the myusername@free.kindle.com addresses are responding. The mail is successfully delivered, but then there is no sign of the converted documents on my Kindle 2, or my email account.

Are Amazon’s conversion servers overloaded due to a lot of extra Kindle 2 deliveries today? Anyone have the inside track?

UPDATE 2/25/2009 10:45AM:

The Kindle document conversion servers have certainly been delayed. Amazon does send the converted documents, but it takes about 15+ minutes. This is different from two days ago when conversions were nearly instant (1-2 minutes at most). Amazon is likely spending some time to make the service scale a little more.