Amazon Kindle

I am a super huge fan of the Amazon Kindle. For any that know me it is one the few devices that does travel everywhere I do whether I am going to use it or not. Still there is a couple of problems with the device. The biggest of which is getting my documents on the device without have to pass them through amazon. Since usually upload whole series of books at the same time it becomes a massive pain to email each pdf…html file one at a time to Amazon then wait for the response so I can download it and copy it onto my device.

The obvious solution to this problem is to use MobiPocket Creator. There is no question that this is a great solution. But again I do multiple files at the same time each time through the program depending on the size of the PDF I have it is about 5 screens and then a lengthy processing delay since MobiPocket does like to extract images from PDFs. Ultimately this is too much time delay. Although you can run the program multiple times on top of itself and do multiple files. It leaves a good bit of garbage from the processing. I gotta admit this is super annoying as well.

My solution is not so far from MobiPocket Creator. A derivative if you will called mobigen. This cute little command line tool does all the big work of MobiPocket Creator as far as outputing a mobi file from a HTML input. So now its all about getting our documents into an HTML file and passing it to mobigen. In most cases getting a file to HTML these days is not that bad. The 3 Most common files I have in my book library are HTML, PDF, and LIT. Of course LIT is a bit of an oddball since it is a Microsoft product that seems to have lost a lot of favor. 

To wrap up the story I grabbed AutoIt v3 and built a real dirty file processing interface for the data processors I found to use with my solution which I call the Auto Kindle Converter (Yea I know now the best name ever but….) In reality it works off file extensions. Figures out the file type and location and passes it to the correct command line processor. pdf2html for PDF files, clit for lit files, and mobigen for straight HTML and for the output of these other processors. I think in the end the app is less then 40 lines long but it does great things within the AutoIt runtime.

Here is a quick Tutorial for v0.2.20

Once you install the program you will find it in the start menu.

Your First Screen Looks Like This.

File Select

Browse to a select a file and click Open

Next:

A new window opens asking for a destination for the processed file

Select Destination

At this point user input is done. The app will do the rest you will see a progress bar like this

Progress Bar

At this point as long as we haven’t hit some kind of random file processing error you file should end up on you Kindle if you selected your Kindle as the destination.

Errors you may encounter.

Document may have Copy Protection and Cannot be Processed

This I admit is a bit of a general error. But what it does tell us is that there was a stop in the middle of the conversion.

In the case of a PDF it could be that the file was Copy Protected

In the case of a HTML file the system is still showing the file as open and cannot move the file. The above error may show like this:

Output Filename may be Incorrect. Before Trying Again Look Here (the location of the installed Temp folder)

In the case of a LIT file this is a known issue with how clit generates a filename for its output file. clit can retrieve the internal title of the document and at times this is different from the filename causing the output file to be lost by the Kindle Converter. This is actually the easiest to resolve. In the programs application folder is a Temp folder. This keeps all the garbage intermediate files from the last processing until you run the application again. So if you get this error when processing a LIT file you can just copy the HTML that was left in the Temp folder to somewhere safe and run the program again on the html file to get the processed output. I am working on a work around for this one but as of v0.2.20 it can be a bit annoying.

I hope you enjoy this application.

Please post any comments about it here. At Sourceforge or on my forum http://forum.deadmessengers.net HERE

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