Kindle ebook conversions

[Bunger Henry]

Does anyone know a way to get at the text in these Kindle files that Amazon is selling, and import the text into Textaloud? I know it can be done with Microsoft Reader. Just wondering about Kindle.

[D.Leikin]

Something like

http://www.nextup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3953

should probably help on that.

[Bunger Henry]

Thanks for the info. I live in constant fear that Microsoft Reader will go the way of the Betamax, or HD DVD, and get replaced by a format that has better marketing. And then I would have to go back to cutting up paperbacks and scanning pages on my Microtek. That's a cumbersome chore I would like to avoid if possible.

[LessPaul]

Kindle ebooks are in the same file format as Mobipocket books. An internet search should yield several MobiPocket and/or Kindle decryptors. The legality of decrypting your own ebook varies country-to-country and state-to-state. I do not know a current download site, and due to the legal cloud, would not post it to this forum if I did. However the forums at http://dev.mobileread.com would be a good place to start.

Note that they will only decrypt an eBook if you are a legitimate owner of the ebook and know the PID or ID for your reader device. The code is required to decrypt. The output format of some of the available tools is a palm PDB file. An additional (free) converter for palm files is available from http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html

[geneven]

Recently some rogue wrote a program called "unswindle" that works great at converting Kindle files into unprotected files. You can no doubt find it by Googling the words "unswindle" and "Kindle". It works very easily. You have to have installed Kindle for PC to use it. (There is a version of Kindle for PC that works with Linux, by the way, but it is probably hard to find now.)

Then it's in unprotected .mobi format,which can be read by programs such as FBReader and probably convertable into a format readable by TextAloud using a program such as Calibre.

Considering that Amazon itself released Kindle for PC, which allows you to read any Kindle book on a PC without having a Kindle, the world of non-protected text files appears to be getting bigger, good news for TextAloud users.

This site seems to have been rather inactive, a shame since it's one of my all-time favorite sites. I hope that NextUp tries to sell me me something soon -- I'm in a buying mood and I can't think of a better place to spend it.

[SFCurley]

I'll also add that Amazon has two different protection schemes -- one on which unswindle works with, one which it won't. The other protection scheme that unswindle doesn't work with is called Topaz, which is a very hard-to-extract format. However, here's the site of a developer who has found a way around it it.

http://darkreverser.wordpress.com/2008/ ... /#comments

Toward the bottom of the posts, you'll see links to download the latest versions of the scripts to un-Topaz the files, but as with unswindle, you need to actually own the book on your Kindle or iPhone.

The reason I would want unprotect a book is not to share it (as I like that fact that authors get paid for their work!), but mostly because I either want to put it into TextAloud OR because I prefer much prefer the Stanza reader to the native Kindle app on my iPhone for actual reading.

[geneven]

I also want to unprotect Amazon books because I like to read them on my new Nokia N900 phone/mini-computer. It has nothing to do with sharing with other users. But TextAloud is also a big motivator.

[kremesch]

I recently sent in the request for both the Mac and the PC to enable TTS on the PC and Mac versions of Kindle. Amazon replied right away and said they'd be happy to look into it. Maybe if they got more requests it will help give them a better nudge.

One thing to keep in mind though, is that Amazon has had to leave the enabling of TTS up to the individual publishers due to an uproar over silly copyright issues that were brought up from the Writer's Guild. Some publishers feel that it heavily infringes on the fine line that borders into legitimate audio books, and Amazon, despite their stand that the issue is like comparing apples to oranges, recently backed down.

This leads me to assume that some Kindle books may be TTS enabled, whereas others will have the ability strictly cut off, depending on the Publisher's stand on what consists of a copyright in regards to audiobooks. Either way, I'd still like to see the ability enabled, even if it's only for 50% of the books available - it's still better than nothing.