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.
Oh. Nice. Seriously crazy cool, too. I think I’m going the same route as you…installing calibre on my Linux dev VM, and converting things off the device, but just knowing how far he’s gotten is impressive.
And that CBZ note is excellent. I think I have some around somewhere…hey, here’s a link to some folks selling them, that have issue #1 available as CBZ for free: http://www.uniquescomic.com/store-comics.php#issue001