Mongoose PDFs to Kindle

[apastuszak]

Here in the US, we have a huge sale day known as Black Friday. Well that has kind of warped into all sorts of deals throughout the month of November.

The Amazon Kindle Scribe, an eBook reader with a 10.2 inch screen was $100 off. So, I picked one up.

It reads PDFs and will let you annotate them.

Which is great. But the PDF renderer is SLOW. Painfully slow at times.

Luckily, I found a procedure online that allows me to convert a PDF to Fixed Layout KFX format.

The rendering and page turn times of a KFX file is a LOT faster than a PDF file on Kindle devices.

It would be nice if Mongoose could provide a KFX download option for use on Kindles.

 

[AndrewW]

Calibre (free) can convert between most formats:

https://calibre-ebook.com/

 

[Anstett]

Most if not all of the Traveller Fiction that Mongoose sells is already in a Kindle format currently.

Full agree that having the Scribe to read all the books on is great.

 

[apastuszak]

Well, I'm playing with this now. PDFs are definitely a second-class citizen on the Kindle Scribe. And converting the PDF to Amazon's native KFX format only partly solves the problem. The Kindle takes longer than it should to render pages with graphics on them. The more complicated the PDF, the worse it is. The Core Rulebook PDF converted to KFX takes anywhere from between instantaneous to 5 seconds to turn a page, depending on how many images are on the page.

The worst for me so far is the Savage Worlds PDF. That can take as long as 15 seconds to do a page turn.

I'm experimenting now with converting to a PDF to greyscale and see if that speeds up page rendering times.

 

[apastuszak]

I thought I would share an update procedure for doing this, if you own a Kindle Scribe and wants to view your Mongoose PDFs on it. I shamelessly stole this process from a reddit post. It's a 2-step process:

1. Convert the PDF to greyscale using a free tool called Ghostscript using the following command line:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -o rulebook-bw.pdf rulebook.pdf

With rulebook.pdf being the filename of the rulebook you are trying to convert, and rulebook-bw.pdf being the file you're making.

2. Go to the Send to Kindle website: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/
3. Upload your file and let Amazon process it. Once it's done the file is show up on your Kindle home screen. When you click on it, it will download onto your Kindle.

If anyone is curious, I can take some pics of the screen and maybe make a quick video of page turns.