But having a device dedicated to ebooks, with e-ink, with a shop where I could buy modern books, not just public domain classics, often for significantly less than a retail paper book, and have it instantly downloaded. It was awesome.
I'm also a fan of it keeping track of what I've read, and when, and Kindle's "Reading Insights" does this. I can set a goal of how many books I want to read in a given year, and it'll keep track of that for me. I can quickly scroll through and see what books I've read for any given year (since the feature was introduced, at least). On a similar note, it also tracks how many days and weeks in a row I've read. This may be a silly little thing, but it ends up being good motivation to keep up on my reading, especially if I'm otherwise in a bit of a slump. Maybe I'm reading something that's a bit slow, or maybe life has gotten me down. But I've been reading for 237 weeks in a row, and 78 days in a row, so I better keep these numbers up. If life gets in the way and I miss a day (which those real numbers attest, does happen), that's okay. I can build up a new streak. But it's nice to have these tracking features.
In the time since I've actually mostly stopped using the physical Kindle device itself, though it was a worthy companion for many years. No real complaints about the device. I'd gathered quite a collection of books in my Kindle Library, but it became somewhat cumbersome to bring the actual Kindle device along with me whenever I guessed that I might have time to read something. It was good for reading at home. It was good if I knew I was going to be in a specific place for an extended period of time and I was already going to have some sort of bag to put it back into.
But for day to day reading, reading when waiting in line at the grocery store, waiting for a doctor's visit or whatever, it just became easier to read on my phone. And then soon using the Kindle app on my phone became my primary method for reading. No cool e-ink display, sadly, but every other benefit of the Kindle pretty much still existed when using the Kindle app. Same large library of books, but now on the device I was already going to be carrying around with me, already keeping charged, and was smaller than the actual Kindle device anyway. (There is something to be said for having a dedicated device for a thing, for dedicating time to the activity without distractions, but for this activity, this device, the convenience of almost always having a book in my pocket was well worth the minimal issue that presents to me. Though sometimes I do hate getting a text while I'm reading, so if I don't respond to you right away, know that I may actually not be on Earth in 202X, but could be on Roshar or in the future or the past.)
All of this is a preamble, really. But this is where the issues really start to come up, however, but allow me to continue setting the stage just a little bit more.
I previously shouted out Project Gutenberg, and they are a great resource. However, anyone who has used them knows that they provide the texts they do in a slightly less than ideal format for reading, especially as ebooks. That is, they provide the text of the books, without any formatting into an ebook. This is still a public good, their archival efforts are laudable and I absolutely appreciate what they do. There just is a difference between raw text and a proper formatted ebook. And occasionally, OCR mis-reads or other errors can crop into these text.
There is another resource, however, a wonderful site called Standard Ebooks. They take public domain texts, like the ones on Gutenberg, but then proofread, format, and adjust them into a professional-grade modern ebook. They are absolutely wonderful. They, like Gutenberg, are not for profit. They are volunteer led and all the labor involved is done by volunteers. You don't have to pay for these books, and that is 100% a public good.
So, lets say you want to read a classic Golden Age of Detective Fiction novel, so you think why not start at the start of said age? Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first of the Poirot novels (you may know Poirot from all the famous books he's the central detective character in, or the film adaptations of those, such as Murder on the Orient Express). Hop on over there and you can download it and read it for free! What a wonderful thing!
Ah, look, they've got it in Kindle format. AZW3, Amazon's proprietary ebook format. Well, that raises some questions of course, like why does an ebook need a proprietary format, but whatever. You can see that there are other formats, like the widely considered standard format of epub, but I have a Kindle. I should use the Kindle file type, yeah? Now, how does one get this AZW3 that one just downloaded onto one's Kindle? The file is here on my computer. The app is on my phone. If I was using the Kindle device itself I know I can plug it in and copy the file over and it'll be stored locally, but if I want to read the same book perhaps both on the device AND on my phone, that doesn't work. It's local only, not saved to the Kindle Library. Oh okay, I know, I'll just go to the Standard Ebooks site on my phone and download the ebook again, then I should be able to open the file like any other file opens with any other app that uses a specific file type on my phone (ie. you download a picture, you tap the picture, it opens in your picture viewing app).
Wait, what's this? I tapped on the file, but I can't open it? My phone suggests searching in it's app store to find an app that can open AZW3 files? That's weird. I have the Kindle app. It should open Kindle formatted files, yeah?
So let me see. Well, there is another way to add files to your Kindle library. Each Kindle is assigned it's own email address, and in your amazon settings you can whitelist email addresses that are allowed to email files to said address, thus sending the attached files to your Kindle library. I've used this a number of times, to add books purchased through Humble Bundle or from that one Brandon Sanderson kickstarter. So let me just email this Amazon Proprietary Kindle Ebook Format file to my Amazon Kindle Library.
Aaaaand, nope. Can't do that. Not allowed. A return email reads, in part:
"Dear Customer,
A document, sent at (time and date), could not be delivered.
Send to Kindle can convert and deliver the following types of documents:
If the format of the document that failed is supported (listed above), please ensure the document is not password protected or encrypted, and try sending it again."
"Dear Customer,
A document, sent at (time and date), could not be delivered.
Send to Kindle can convert and deliver the following types of documents:
- EPUB (.epub)
- Adobe PDF (.pdf)
- Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
- Rich Text Format (.rtf)
- HTML (.htm, .html)
- Text (.txt) documents
- Compressed documents (.zip, .xzip)
- JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), Bitmap (.bmp), and PNG (.png) images.
If the format of the document that failed is supported (listed above), please ensure the document is not password protected or encrypted, and try sending it again."
So, I can draw a picture in Microsoft Paint, save it as a .bmp file, and email THAT to my Kindle library. But I can't email a KINDLE FILE to my KINDLE LIBRARY.
But Bryce, you say. Look again at Standard Ebooks! There are other file formats available! Including EPUB, which is on the above list!
Yes indeed, it is. Amazon says that Kindle supports EPUB files, which if you don't know is kind of the general standard format for ebooks, a file format which Amazon specifically did not support on Kindles for a long time. While most every other ebook reader and ebook maker was supporting the standard, epub, Amazon had to go and specifically not support it, because then you could buy an ebook somewhere else and read it on your Kindle, thus not buying it on Kindle, which means you're giving less money to Amazon. So no no no, not allowed. They did allow Mobi files, which is an older and less robust format, but have since dropped support for mobi files since it's a pretty outdated standard.
So, sure. I could download the epub version of whatever book, and then email it to myself. BUT there is a reason that I might not want that. And that's because, in fact, Kindles still do not actually display the epub files that you have sent it. When you email an epub file to your Kindle library, Amazon grabs that file, and does an automatic conversion into a Kindle supported file-type. You may think "okay so what's the problem then?" Indeed, this may be where I lose you. But automatic conversions of something that is highly dependent on formatting doesn't always turn out so great. Especially when it's an epub, a still supported but older format, into the black box of whatever Amazon does to it behind the scenes.
And especially when I already have a perfectly fine AZW3 version of that file available! Again, just to clarify, AZW3 is the latest version of Amazon's own "Kindle File Format." It was created by Amazon for their Kindles. But I cannot send a Kindle File Format file to my Kindle.
In accepting the Epub email solution, I am relying on Amazon's automatic conversion to not mangle the format of the text, formatting which is the whole point of the ebook (as opposed to raw text... think of it like printing out the text of a book on stacks and stacks of unbound printer paper VS a book that has text on both sides of a page and is bound in a conveniently portable format). It should be largely passable, but since ebooks are actually slightly more complicated than just text, there is space for the conversion to mess some things up, perhaps even remove any images or special formatting that the book has.
I should note that there are cases where the conversion is perfectly
fine. Indeed, AZW3 seems to mostly be an epub but with that proprietary
Amazon branding slapped over top of it. However, there are some
technical differences, and sometimes there are cases where some
technical details in the epub are not properly read by Amazon's
conversion, and can thus mangle the epub and give you a messed up
result.
There is, actually, a workaround! But it comes with it's own drawback, which we shall get to later.
Indeed, it may seem simple and silly, but you can take that AZW3 file which you downloaded on your phone, copy it, move it into the "Kindle" folder on your phone's internal hard drive, open the Kindle app, and the book will appear! How easy could that be?! Bryce, are you an idiot for not just doing that in the first place? Ah, dear reader, were it that simple.
This method does, indeed, work, in that you can open the file and read it on the Kindle, which does fulfill the basic premise of reading an ebook. In that aspect, I do not complain.
BUT there is a downside. And that downside is that the Kindle app doesn't actually believe that these are books! For some unholy reason that only the twisted minds deep inside Amazon could ever possibly comprehend, the Kindle app does not count these books as books that you have read. You can read the entire text and get to the end, but the Kindle app will never count it as "read". The Mysterious Affair at Style is stuck eternally at 98% on my Kindle despite having reached the final page of the book, and the book tracking feature does not consider it a finished book. So that's pretty annoying too. I've already beat my reading goal for the year, and this is all just silly superfluous stuff anyway. The book reads fine, all the usual reading parts are still readable, the formatting is intact.
I just don't understand why amazon would make it more difficult to get the files you want onto your Kindle, or why they don't recognize a book as a book, even in their own proprietary format. Why must I choose which downside I want to deal with in order to read a classic book? Or a book I purchased from another location? Is it only about being just annoying enough to drive people to only ever purchase from themselves? Is it that petty? Do they not already have something like 80% of the e-reader market??
It's baffling and they do not explain their reasoning anywhere.
For most people these may be minor complaints. I assume most people won't care or may not even notice if the automatic conversion changes the formatting somewhat, as long as the text is still there and readable. I assume most people will be relatively okay with just having to remember to add +1 to the book number that Kindle tells them. Then again, there are quite a few good books available from Standard Ebooks. Once could easily read a large number of them per year, and then the book tracking and reading goals features become less and less relevant and useful for each book you read that way.
A number of years ago decided I wanted to read more classics, to expand my literary horizons, to broaden my knowledge of literature. And I have done that, and I intend to continue doing that, in addition to reading the bunch of fantasy and sci-fi books I tend to read. I have a number of other books from Standard Ebooks that I want to read, but these issues with Kindle are annoying. I may have to resort to re-downloading them all in epub and emailing them to my Kindle library and just accepting the potential format problems, rather than deal with the not-potential problem of not tracking the books.
In doing the research I have done to ensure I didn't tell you any lies, I have actually found another solution to the epub email conversion problem. There is a site, https://kindle-epub-fix.netlify.app/ that will check and convert your epubs into Amazon-acceptable epubs, so that you can email them to your Kindle library without fear of mangling the formatting. This is great, and I'm glad someone with more technical know-how than me has created this solution. However, it's still ridiculous that Amazon can't just fix this themselves. I shouldn't HAVE to go to a third-party website and add this extra step to my process in order to get a book onto my Kindle app where the Kindle features actually work and the formatting is correct. I am very glad this exists, and I will be using it going forward. I shouldn't have to though, Amazon, you should automatically do what this does.
I'd be remiss to not mention that there is another issue with Kindle, and that's the big issue with supporting Amazon financially in general, and all the moral quandaries that that comes with. I don't really want to get into that here though, but I did want to mention that, yeah I know. I understand. I'm not covering that here.
This is, clearly, not the biggest problem facing the world today. It's not even the biggest problem I've faced since I started writing this post. But it's annoying, and I needed to vent about it. Thank you for reading my rant.
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