Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanroher | Hacker News Reader

Very seriously considering a Kindle, but all my eBooks are non-DRM ePUBs. I know Amazon has a feature to get your existing files on the Kindle, but has anyone tried to import ePUBs? Do they transfer 1:1 to Amazon's format?

View on HN

Kindle supports MOBI/PRC/AZW but not ePUB. You could use the free conversion tool calibre and batch convert your books from ePUB.

Most books are pretty easy to convert. As mentioned elsewhere, calibre does a good job at it, although the GUI looks like it crept out of someones mid-90s Tcl/Tk nightmares.

A problem I've seen with epub books is missing hyphenation, which really messes up the display. And this was on "native" devices (Sony PRS, nook). Haven't seen really good typography on any of the ereader devices. This includes the iPad…

calibre also comes with an "ebook-convert" CLI program.

It works as advertised.

    $ ebook-convert book.epub book.mobi
    ...
    $ cp book.mobi /media/Kindle/documents/

The kindlegen command-line program from Amazon is pretty easy to use, and supports ePub and HTML: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...

Works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

PDF: Fine

HTML: Rename file to .txt and it lets you read the HTML page like a text file. But it's not perfect and sometimes complains.

The nook support ePUB.

This is one of those things that surprises me about technology people that push openness. I won't buy a Kindle until it supports ePub as a default format. Amazon went out of their way to create a proprietary format for a reason: lock-in. There are plenty of official ways to convert to AZW, but the format is owned by Amazon and can change breaking any of the unofficial ways to convert back.

I'm interested in the nook for following reasons:

- Access to public library books using Overdrive

- Being able to 'lend' books purchased from B&N store for 2 weeks to other nook owners.

I like B&N's focus on more customer friendly features.

Thanks, I've been trying to decide between Kindle and Nook on the assumption that I'll mostly read Project Gutenberg books anyway. So you're saying that Nook would be better for me?

The nook works perfectely well with the Project Gutenberg books. I recently found this fact out and downloaded over 50 books and they are all nicely sitting on my nook now. The only drawback is that they are seperated from your purchased books and are found only in the My Documents section of the nook. (I do not know if this is a rule, but I haven't found a way around it.) I would have liked to see them right along side my purchased books.

Thanks to http://manybooks.net/, either would work perfectly well for texts in the public domain.

Gutenberg has all their books in Mobipocket as well, which the Kindle supports natively.

This is precisely why I got a Sony Reader instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com