Wow. It’s been a long time since I saw such a collection of misinformation in one place. Let’s go through a few of the more risible inaccuracies, shall we?

1) “Wiki” and “Wikipedia” are not synonymous. A wiki is a technology, like email. Wikipedia is one wiki. There are hundreds of thousands of others.

2) “If downloaders found “safe” alternative routes to ripped-off stuff, huge numbers would descend down those narrower highways. It would be as if the residents of Springfield were offered free beer on certain roads.”

This displays a degree of ignorance about how the Internet works so profound that I don’t even know where to begin.

3) “Where is this freedom they’re all talking about, if they can pull the plug on their service when they can’t get what they want for free?”

Total non sequitur. What is this even supposed to mean?

3) “One had widespread support within the creative economy”

First, the MPAA, RIAA, et al don’t have a monopoly on creativity. Second, inserting yourself between the the talent and the money isn’t “creative”. It’s parasitism. Sorry.

4) “the Open Rights Movement (ORM) – as the loosely affiliated group of internet activists and online corporate interests who backed the Wiki blackout style themselves”

I find no evidence of any of these groups or individuals “styling themselves” the “Open Rights Movement”, and barely any mention of the term. Google turns up only 18 hits for “Open Rights Movement”, none of which appear to be from backers of the Wikipedia blackout.

5) “the myth that traditional creative businesses – film companies, book publishers and record company executives – are the greedy exploiters in this market.”

Oh, no. They’re not greedy exploiters. They just suck up 90% or more of the revenue. A GREEDY exploiter would take what, 95%?

6) “It was the active and vocal campaigns of writers in the 19th Century that established copyright in the first place.”

In fact, copyright was first established by the Statute of Anne, which was enacted in 1710. Hint: 1710 was not in the Nineteenth Century.

What she said.

Jim “Edupunk” Groom’s institution is now REQUIRING that all instructors use the campus system (in this case Canvas, aka  Blackboard with sugar-coated sprinkles on top) unless a) the alternative system uses the institution’s SSO and b) you get five or six people to sign off on it — all the way up to the CIO. No WordPress. No Moodle. No Google Docs. No Edmodo. No Google+. No Facebook.  No nothin’.  Academic freedom? Whuzzat?

I’ll go even further than Bates here. This is the end of the Cal State system as an independent entity.

Whoa!

Just a temporary bump because Unit I is free today, I’m sure, but still…

Neat. I’m wondering if there’s been a processor speed bump.

It’s in Kindle Select, so you can read it for free if you have Amazon Prime.

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth

Note that this blog’s typeface is now Baskerville.

Update: the lesson has been accepted for KDP Select. If you have Amazon Prime, you’ll be able to borrow it for free. By all means feel free to do so.

Unit I Cover

The more you know…

A mere few weeks after the Vatican. Heh.

Update: gone.

The script does a decent job of getting you in the right ballpark, though you may still want to do some manual tweaking afterward.

Here’s the script:

(define (restore-faded image drawable convert-monochrome contrast-change)
 (gimp-levels-stretch drawable)
 (gimp-brightness-contrast drawable 0 contrast-change)
 (if (= convert-monochrome TRUE) (pass-through-grayscale image) TRUE)
 (gimp-displays-flush image))

(define (pass-through-grayscale image)
 (gimp-convert-grayscale image)
 (gimp-convert-rgb image))

(script-fu-register
 "restore-faded" ;func name
 "Restore Faded Image" ;menu label
 "(Attempts to) restore faded images." ;description
 "Anthony W. Hursh" ;author
 "Copyright 2012, Contraterrene eLearning Group, LLC;\
 GPL" ;copyright notice
 "July 18, 2012" ;date created
 "RGB*" ;image type that the script works on
 SF-IMAGE "Image" 0
 SF-DRAWABLE "Drawable" 0
 SF-TOGGLE "Pass through gray scale" TRUE
 SF-ADJUSTMENT "Contrast change" '(20 0 127 1 10 0 1)

 )
 (script-fu-menu-register "restore-faded" "<Image>/Restore Faded")

Stick this wherever your GIMP package expects to find scripts (/Library/Application Support/GIMP/scripts for the Mac package I use) then either restart GIMP or go to Filters/Script-Fu/Refresh scripts.

Since I’ve been doing this a lot, I put it right on the main menu bar. If you don’t use it so much you may want to put it in a submenu. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

You may be wondering about the odd-looking language; it’s Scheme, which is a variety of Lisp. GIMP lets you control almost every function using Scheme (GIMP calls this facility “Script-Fu”).

A couple of black and white examples (the image is The Mysterious Rose Garden by Aubrey Beardsley):

Before

After

Color examples (the illustration is by Arthur Rackham, from a 1916 edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens):

Before

After

Update: gone.

I’m currently producing these using Bucherrad, my experimental ebook compiler. It’s definitely a geek-oriented tool at present, though the eventual plan is to have a user-friendly, GUI-based front end (likely this will be the next version of Abulafia).

Note that all ebooks of the week are in the public domain in the United States (typically because they were first published prior to 1923) but may not be in other countries; I can’t make general statements about that because there are too many differences and weird exceptions (for instance, I recently found out that British Crown still claims copyright on the King James Bible in the U.K., even though it was first published in 1611(!)). If in doubt, check your local laws before downloading.

I spent a fair amount of time restoring the illustrations for this one. There are some reduced-size samples below. The images in the actual ebooks are a full 1024 pixels wide, and should look good even if you have a new iPad (in general I pick the ebook of the week because the preexisting free versions that I’ve seen have bad formatting, low-quality illustrations, or both).

Before

After

Watermarking schemes are certainly less onerous than most forms of DRM (and personally, I don’t find them objectionable per se) but will do absolutely nothing to discourage large-scale piracy.

Imagine this scenario:

1) Buy a prepaid Visa card at Walgreens, with cash.

2) Register at Amazon with a fresh Gmail account and an assumed name (perhaps “Ima Cracker”), ideally from a public Wifi connection.

3) Pirate at will. Remove the watermarks, or don’t. It won’t matter, since there’s no solid connection between the watermark information and the pirate.

From what I know of such people, not only would they not bother to remove the “This Book Belongs to Ima Cracker” watermark, they would consider it a badge of honor. Remember, these are the same people who actually write and insert extra code to ensure that their noms de guerre appear on the startup screen of pirated software.

I can’t see how this could possibly be effective unless you (e.g.) made the ebook retailers require a photo ID at the time of purchase.

Thanks to Harry for this.

The most interesting bit was in the comments, where a reader said “I have no desire to crack the DRM on Amazon’s ebooks. There’s no one I’m willing to steal from so that I can benefit myself or my friends. The legal issues are simple: theft = illegal.”

My take:

There’s no way that moving a book that you own from one device that you own to another device that you own could be considered “theft” under any rational definition of that term. Illegal? Possibly. Immoral? No, not in my opinion.

Earlier in the article, Pogue said “If you actually read the steps [to remove DRM -- awh], you’ll see that it’s nothing short of a hack; not user-friendly by any means. But yes, it’s possible.”

The thing is, that only has to be done once. Not once for every reading device, or every legal copy of the book. Once. Period.

A reader whose legitimately-purchased ebook stops working might buy another copy (highly unlikely, IMO… once bitten, twice shy), or might go through the steps to remove the DRM on his own copy (unlikely for other than turbokgeeks, for the reasons Pogue mentions) or, in the most likely scenario, might find a copy online that already has the DRM removed.  So… you now have an angry customer who is feeling as though the publisher ripped him off, looking at a site that has essentially every ebook ever made available for download. For free. Is that really what the publishers want? I can’t imagine what it is.

Steve Jobs managed to drag the music people kicking and screaming into a world where customers could buy music friction-free, at a reasonable price, and then make further use of their purchases on other devices (e.g., by burning the song to a CD). If he’d survived, perhaps he’d have managed the same for the book publishing, but we’ll never know.

There are a few bright spots in the publishing world (e.g., Tor’s recent decision to abandon DRM), but  I’m not optimistic that the publishing industry as a whole will wise up in time.

Update: gone, but iPad/iPhone users can get a free copy on the iBookstore.

If you’re reading this page on an iPad, you should be able to just click the link and tell the iPad to open it in iBooks. Otherwise you can transfer it with iTunes. For the Kindle, you can either transfer it with your USB cable or use Amazon’s Send to Kindle software.

You can get Bucherrad for OS X and Windows here. It’s free, but do note that the software is experimental at this point. There’s some preliminary documentation, and you can also get the source code if you like (it also runs on Unix/Linux platforms, in which case the source is what you want — see the documentation for installation instructions on *n*x).

Some screenshots:

iBooks on iPad

Kindle Fire

Nook Desktop App (unfortunately I don’t have a hardware Nook). No dropcaps or custom fonts on this platform.

eInk Kindle. Uses a pseudo-dropcap (basically just a large character), but no custom font.

iBooks on the iPhone. Dropcaps and fonts work.  Note hanging indent due to limited screen size.

Kindle app on the iPhone. No dropcap or fonts, but hanging indent works.

Some or all of Bucherrad’s code will likely be used in the back end of the next generation of Abulafia, but it is intended to be useful on its own (particularly if you need a high degree of control over your book’s appearance).

Preliminary docs

Installer downloads for OS X and Windows

Source code repository

Note that this should be considered experimental alpha-quality software at this stage. If it breaks, you get to keep both halves.

Neal Stephenson fans may recall the bucherrad of Leibniz in the Baroque Cycle, which was a device something like this (bucherrad looks like a straightforward German translation of bookwheel, though I think it should actually be written as bücherrad).

I’ve also set up a discussion group for the software.

Given that most of the stuff I’ve been posting has been kid-friendly, I should point out that this book does include mature themes and imagery.

This is the first book off the “press” for Bucherrad, my next-gen book renderer, which I’m looking forward to releasing within the week. Unlike Abulafia, Bucherrad is driven by text-based formatting commands and includes a domain-specific language for book layout and creation (and if the built-in commands aren’t enough, you can also embed arbitrary Ruby code in your source file).  It’s going to be released as GPL, I believe, though I haven’t decided on the license for sure.

Even though Bucherrad is command driven, some of the ideas and techniques in it will very likely find their way into Abulafia in the long term.

The Peacock Skirt

The Dancer’s Reward

More spinning of the sort we’ve come to expect from the Authors Guild (which really should change its name to the Publishers Guild for Author Peonage, or something along those lines).

The “buy button removal campaign” nonsense is particularly egregious.  Amazon and the publishers failed to reach an agreement, at which point Amazon no longer had the rights to sell those books. What were they supposed to do? Keep a (non-working) buy button?

You can certainly make a case that Amazon is a hardball negotiator, but complaining when they remove a buy button for a book that they no longer have available to sell is just absurd.

Plenty of good advice here.

Update: gone.

Off with her head!

How to get the book on your reader:

Kindle Method I: Connect your device to your computer with the USB cable. The Kindle should show up as an external “drive”. Drag the book file into the Documents folder on the Kindle, then eject the device. On some Kindle models, your book will show up like any other. On others, you’ll need to look in Docs rather than Books.

Kindle Method II: Download and install Amazon’s free Send to Kindle app for either Mac or Windows. This nifty app not only lets you send ebooks to your device, it also lets you “print” to your Kindle from any application that uses the standard print mechanism (i.e., when you go to File/Print, the Kindle shows up as a “printer”). To transfer the book using Send to Kindle, just right-click (or control-click, if you’re one of those who still has a one-button mouse) on the file and choose Send to Kindle (Open with/Send to Kindle on the Mac).

iBooks: open iTunes and drag the file to the Library section, then connect your device and sync it.

Nook: Caveat: I don’t have a Nook, so can’t verify that this works, but it appears to be similar to Kindle method I. Connect your Nook with the USB cable, and it should show up as an external “drive”. Drag the book file into the appropriate folder (which, again, may vary depending on model — web documents indicate that it may be called either Books or My Documents). Eject the “drive” and enjoy.

Andrew Zack: Making E-books Is Harder Than It Looks.

Let’s take Zack’s arguments one at a time, beginning with the most egregious first.

His “hosting cost” argument is total nonsense. Assuming that you even want to do your own hosting and delivery (rather than just letting Amazon, B&N, et al do it for you), you can get 20 gigs of disk space and 200 gigs of bandwidth for $19.95/month. That’s enough to hold roughly 10,000 different books and deliver 100,000 copies per month (assuming 2 MB per book; obviously that’s going to be different if the book has (e.g.) many large color images, but even in that case it’s still going to be a trivial expense).

You don’t need to pay “third-party hosts with experience in ecommerce”   “four- or five-figure set-up fees” to put your book in the Kindle or B&N stores. You can do it yourself in about 15 minutes. For free.

You do still need copy editors, cover artists, and so on (assuming you can’t do those things yourself). What you don’t need to do is hand over the lion’s share of your revenue to some middleman in (effective) perpetuity in order to get them. There are people who will edit your book and create a cover image for a flat fee up front (in fact, some of them are the same people who do those things for the “professional publishers” — those functions are largely outsourced anyway). You don’t need to pay an agent 15%, either.

Later, in the comments, he trots out the tired old “without professional editors we’ll be buried under a mountain of crap” canard. Yes, there is a lot of self-published crap. There’s also a lot of professionally-published crap (cough…Snooki…cough). So what if it’s mostly crap? The web itself is the largest slushpile in the history of the human race,  yet somehow I still find more good stuff than I have time to read.

I’m planning to post a free public domain book every week; we’ll see how that goes. I reserve the right to stop if bandwidth becomes excessive, if I don’t have time, or if I just don’t feel like it.

The inaugural edition is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, with the famous illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

How to get the book on your reader:

Kindle Method I:  Connect your device to your computer with the USB cable.  The Kindle should show up as an external “drive”.  Drag the book file into the Documents folder on the Kindle, then eject the device.  On some Kindle models, your book will show up like any other. On others, you’ll need to look in Docs rather than Books.

Kindle Method II: Download and install Amazon’s free Send to Kindle app for either Mac or Windows. This nifty app not only lets you send ebooks to your device, it also lets you “print” to your Kindle from any application that uses the standard print mechanism (i.e., when you go to File/Print, the Kindle shows up as a “printer”).  To transfer the book using Send to Kindle, just right-click (or control-click, if you’re one of those who still has a one-button mouse) on the file and choose Send to Kindle (Open with/Send to Kindle on the Mac).

iBooks: open iTunes and drag the file to the Library section, then connect your device and sync it.

Nook:  Caveat: I don’t have a Nook, so can’t verify that this works, but it appears to be similar to Kindle method I. Connect your Nook with the USB cable, and it should show up as an external “drive”. Drag the book file into the appropriate folder (which, again, may vary depending on model — web documents indicate that it may be called either Books or My Documents). Eject the “drive” and enjoy.

There’s a reason why most books use solid black text. It’s not because of cost. Color ink costs more, that’s true, but gray text could be produced by by printing black ink more thinly, so it should actually be cheaper. The fact that no book publisher does this (again with exceptions for headings, sidebars, or the like) should give you pause. Just stop. My eyes thank you.

Update: it just occurred to me that some of this might be an ill-advised attempt to reproduce the look of Apple material. Now, Apple does use gray font colors in short advertising paragraphs, headings, and so on (just as I noted above), but go look at some long-form material from Apple (developer documentation, e.g.). What color is the text? Hint: not gray.

Update #2: I got a few nitpicky comments in other venues about the fact that this site itself does not use stark black and white. I would have thought that it was clear from context that what I was complaining about was low-contrast gray text of the type shown in the example, but apparently some people need to have that made explicit.

If you really want to get picky, no monitor can display pure black or pure white anyway. This text is legible. This text is not.

From Shin-Bijutsukai, a Japanese design magazine, circa 1902. Who knew the Japanese had wifi way back then?

Courtesy The Public Domain Review. Many other gorgeous resources there.

I realize that this is tongue-in-cheek, but really…

Authors have always had to promote themselves. Dickens, e.g., kept up a grueling schedule of international lecture tours for close to 30 years. When you consider what that must’ve been like using 19th Century transportation technology, learning to use Twitter and Facebook doesn’t look so bad. It’s just writing. That’s what you do, right?

Making a YouTube video in the comfort of your own home is traumatic? Try traveling thousands of miles by sailing ship and steam train, then getting up on a platform in front of strangers every night and delivering your “video” live.

Google Translate link.

Needless to say, I’m very pleased by this.

This should be a free upgrade if you’ve already purchased Abulafia. Launch the App Store app on your computer to check for upgrades.

If you have a book you’ve formatted with Abulafia, just send me a link and I’ll be happy to give it a plug.

In the meantime, here’s a taste of the new features that are “in” as of right now (do keep in mind that this isn’t the final release, and that some of this may change):

The image dialog now has a proportional settings checkbox. If this is checked, changing one dimension will set the other automatically.

Text can now be dragged and dropped from external programs.

The external HTML editor (if configured) is now auto-launched when you click on a chapter.

Abulafia now auto-saves your text every five minutes, or when you exit the editor. This is closer to the new behavior of Apple products. There isn’t a separate save button any more.

You now have the ability to set an external image editor. This allows you to edit images directly from within Abulafia’s internal HTML editor.

Abulafia now supports automatic formatting and insertion of notes. If you’ve created a Notes page for your book, any text in the main body of the book that is enclosed in triple square brackets will be formatted and inserted as an end note that is automatically (and bidirectionally) linked to the appropriate position in the book. Example:[[[This text would appear as a bidirectionally-linked end note in the compiled book.]]]

Links within the text can now be tested using the Visit button.

Numerous minor UI tweaks.

Update: submitted to the App Store this evening. With luck it’ll be approved in a few days. Current users should get a notification for a free upgrade when it goes live.

Update #2: the demo version linked from the main page is now the same version that was submitted to the Mac App Store (there were a few last-minute changes and bug fixes). Whether this is the exact version that winds up in the App Store is up to Apple’s reviewers (they’re quite picky ).

There’s definitely a need for this; there are other books about writing ebooks (some of which I’ll be reviewing at a later time) but not so many about the business side of publishing — certainly not this up-to-date (basically, anything in this area that’s more than a year old is going to be hopelessly outdated). I just ordered the Kindle version myself, and am looking forward to reading the whole thing.

To be perfectly clear here, the guys at Tor per se (likely including Doherty) actually got this a long time ago. They’re science fiction guys, after all.

I remember them running a pilot project very similar to Baen’s ebook model several years back (they may even have been running it on Baen’s infrastructure), until it got tromped on by someone higher up the corporate food chain (Tor is owned by Macmillan, which in turn is owned by Holtzbrinck).

I’m very likely preaching to the choir here, but DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. Zero. Zip. Nada. It is completely and utterly ineffective, and always will be. The only thing it does is inconvenience your paying customers.

Corporate types always seem to think there’s going to be some magic bullet that will prevent digital files from being copied, but as Bruce Schneier once put it, trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.

As far as I know, every widely-deployed DRM scheme for ebooks has been cracked (no, I’m not linking to any of them, and no, I won’t tell you how to do it). New schemes are typically cracked within days. Remember, the pirate only has to crack the protection scheme once to produce a file that’s completely restriction-free.

This reminds me of numerous conversations I’ve had over the years about disabling right-click on web pages (usually instigated by someone who’s worried about his or her images being stolen, or by educators who are worried about students copying and pasting test information). It can’t be done. Sorry, it just can’t. Yes, you can crap up your page with JavaScript and annoy everyone who uses the right-click context menu for other things, but you can’t stop someone from disabling your script (on the most basic level, just turning off JavaScript will often work — if the page otherwise requires JavaScript, tools like Greasemonkey let the user inject their own JavaScript into the page, which of course makes it trivial to disable yours).

Get it here.

More info here.

Abulafia generates ebooks that are compatible with all major ebook readers, including the Amazon Kindle (with the addition of a free tool from Amazon), the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Apple’s iBooks.

It includes a basic WYSIWYG editor, or the writer can use an external editor or word processor of his or her choice and simply paste the text into Abulafia for formatting and building the ebook.

It uses standard HTML for its working files — no format lock-in.

Starting at 5:39 PM CST, I created a cover image, formatted and compiled an ebook using Abulafia (shameless plug, deal with it), created a video explaining how to set up your Kindle to receive third-party books by email, and wrote a rudimentary book-to-Kindle distribution mechanism (actually, there was very little original code involved — all it really has to do is send the book file as an email attachment, and people have already written that code plenty of times ). If you want to try it, watch the video, then set up your Kindle to allow mail from books@contraterrene.com.

In a (probably vain) attempt to forestall nitpicking:

1. No, I didn’t write the book in that time. It’s actually just a short story; Poe’s Masque of the Red Death — but I could just as easily have copied and pasted his complete works. The writing time is irrelevant to this discussion anyway (you’ll have to write the book no matter how it’s distributed, yes?).
2. The cover image could use some work, certainly. It’s a modification of an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, taken from a 19th century edition of the piece (it may be moderately NSFW, depending on where you W). If I were going to put this up for sale, I’d either spend more time on the cover or hire an artist. Maybe one of these folks.
3. It wouldn’t take much volume to bring this little server to its knees. A production server farm for the likes of the Big Six would need to be much more robust, no question about it (and I’d definitely spend more than 15 minutes on the code ). But, you know, you can spin up as many servers as you want nowadays — within minutes. Hundreds of servers. Thousands of servers. If you don’t want to screw around with maintaining your own, there are companies (including Amazon itself) that will rent you as many commodity servers as you want, by the hour.
4. I don’t have a payment mechanism set up but that’s also a solved problem. These guys, or these guys, or even these guys (if you must). Hundreds of others.
5. Yes, Amazon could shut down the Kindle’s email facilities (or start blocking email from competitors they don’t like), but that would very likely result in the DOJ descending on them. If that happens, getting a third-party book on the Kindle would require the awesomely complex process of plugging it in to your computer, waiting for it to show up as a USB drive, then copying the files (or you could use this — another shameless plug).

It is now 11:08 PM, and I spent 25 minutes of that time talking to my aunt Joyce on the phone about issues unrelated to this project — so about 5 hours total to go from raw text to an ebook that’s available to every Kindle owner on the planet at the click of a button. Not bad.

Remember, that’s the total time to format the book, create the cover image, compile the book, set up the server for distribution, create the tutorial video, and write this blog post.

And I’m just, like, a guy, you know. If I can do this why can’t the Big Six do the same? Claiming that they’re “unable to compete with Amazon” is sheer unadulterated nonsense. Sorry, it just is.

I should note here that forward-thinking publishers such as Baen and Pragmatic Programmers have been doing exactly this for quite some time. I didn’t invent this process. I have probably a couple of dozen books from those publishers on my Kindles right now — none of which were purchased through Amazon.

Update: April 22, 2012

In case it’s not perfectly clear: I’m not planning to go into competition with Amazon myself (certainly not with this server ) — this is just an illustration of how easy it would be. If I can do this in 5 hours, imagine what someone with Rupert Murdoch’s budget could do.

The story choice was not a coincidence. The publishing industry is behaving in much the same way as the characters in the story.

This only addresses ebooks. Amazon, of course, also has a colossal (and massively efficient) infrastructure for delivering physical goods. Now that is an area where it would be very hard to compete with them. Digital goods are another story entirely.

With respect to Amazon “not paying taxes”: Amazon charges sales tax and pays their own taxes in every state where they have a physical presence, and doesn’t in states where they don’t, just like every other mail-order company since, well, always. The same is true of every other retailer from Apple and Barnes & Noble all the way down to the indie bookstore on the corner, which doesn’t collect sales tax on mail orders to other states. This is one of the consequences of a federal form of government. In general, you’re not obliged to abide by the laws of a state unless you’re physically present in that state. Changing that would likely require a constitutional amendment. If you think that’s a good idea, it might be worth considering how you’d feel about being required to abide by all the laws of (insert least-favorite state). That doesn’t sound quite as appealing, does it?

This morning I wrote a droplet to streamline the process a bit. This thingie sits on your desktop (or any other folder of your choice) and takes care of copying files to the proper location on your Kindle.

To use it, just plug in your Kindle (and turn it on/activate it, if you have a Kindle Fire), then drag and drop your mobi files on top of the BookLoader icon. Once the files have been copied you can eject the Kindle’s “disk” and enjoy (the Finder won’t let you eject the disk until the files have finished copying, but this takes only a few seconds).

The droplet is here. The source code (such as it is… this wasn’t exactly a major undertaking ) is here. Code by me, the icon is a modification of an image by Michał Rzeszutek / bocian, and released by him into the public domain. MIT license: do with it as you will.

Tested with my eInk Kindle and my Kindle Fire. Let me know if it doesn’t work on your model.

This is only marginally related, but often puzzles Kindle Fire owners: the mobi format specifies two possible tags, EBOK (for books) and PDOC (for other documents). Until recently most ebook readers (including Kindle) ignored this tag completely, and many ebooks (including those from major publishers) did not include the tag. The Kindle Fire, by contrast, does pay attention to the tag, and assumes that the item is a “doc” rather than a “book” if the tag is not present. If your sideloaded books don’t show up under Books on the Kindle Fire, check under Docs.

If this bothers you, you can use Calibre (above) to add the proper EBOK tag. Personally, I don’t care if they’re under Books or Docs as long as I can find them.