Living the dream: reading fic on the bus

[zelempa]

The process for getting fic onto the Kindle turned out to be a little more involved than I'd expected - Kindle doesn't actually read HTML natively as advertised (boo!) - but it's not that hard (the tedious bit is saving the HTML files to my desktop and find-replacing any special characters, such as em dashes and curly quotes, which may have been garbled in the save; I'd have to do that anyway.)

I used calibre, an open source ebook manager, to batch convert the .htm/.html files to .mobi files which the kindle can read. (In the same program, I also batch updated the metadata so the correct author would appear, which was easy as I stuck to just a few authors for this test. Titles didn't need editing; calibre automatically uses the <title> tag or, failing that, the name of the .html file.)

The results are perfect: the fic looks just like any other ebook, both in the contents and on a page view level. Formatting (italics, h1, etc.) is preserved.

Comments

[sasha_feather]

Yay! Thanks for posting this, I have a Kindle too and have been wondering the best way to get fic on it (I've been emailing it to the Kindle but that costs 15 cents or whatever).

[zelempa]

I thought some people might be wondering. I wanted to avoid amazon's email process altogether so as not to leave a paper trail of copyright whatever (I'm sure their process is automated, but you never know), and because I'm dubious about the costs. My understanding is that if you have amazon email your file back to your email address, and then you copy it to your kindle yourself via usb, the conversion is free (ie the thing that costs money is emailing things to your kindle itself), but I still prefer this method.