Fighting with competing eBook standards

This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I was involved in the production of Fujitsu’s White Book of Cloud Security (continuing the series after the White Book of Cloud Adoption) and earlier today I was sent copies in eBook form.  I emailed them to my Kindle (app), only to find that Amazon doesn’t support .EPUB format books.  Whilst I understand why Amazon might like its own content to appear in a different format, not supporting the .EPUB standard for people to add their own content seems strange (and I’m not alone in thinking this – Jason Perlow wrote about Amazon’s lack of support for .EPUB back in 2010).

Thankfully, it’s pretty simple to convert between .EPUB and MOBI formats, using freely available software (Calibre) – as  highlighted on Twitter by James Williams (@LoneGunmanUK) and Travis Atkinson (@TravisWhayne). It’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I don’t need an eBook library – just a conversion tool) but it’s undoubtably powerful and it seemed to do the job for me.

Incidentally, on my iPad, the .MOBI files viewed in the Kindle app seem to have better results than the .EPUBs in Apple iBooks (which seemed to resize some graphics to the point of illegibility).

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