Savory on the Kindle

My friend Rob sent me a link to Jesse Vincent’s Massively Parallel Procrastination blog, where the author is doing a lot of cool Kindle hacking. He’s created software called Savory that will do on the fly conversion of PDFs to Kindle’s AZW format on the device itself. I think that’s really an interesting and useful thing to do, but I’m not going to install it any time soon, if it all. I don’t have a huge need for PDF conversions and it isn’t worth the small risk of bricking my brand new device at this point.

I think I might explore what he’s doing. I’d much rather do the same conversions on my MacBook and move the files over myself. I don’t mind the overhead and would prefer to lower my risk. It’s really rare for me to buy a device like this at this point in its lifecycle. Translation: I’m usually too cheap a bastard to pay full price for optional gizmos. It’s cool that someone is doing it and I hope people are getting use from it. I’ll hang back on this one, though.

However, one interesting fact that I was not previously aware of was just an aside in one of Jesse’s posts. The Kindle natively supports the .cbz format that the comics digitizing folks use? That was a “holy crap!” type revelation to me. Now I have to find some just to see it work.