First of all I just wanted to express my utmost gratitude to Bhante Sujato and everyone that has made SuttaCentral possible, what an invaluable resource.
I’ve downloaded all of the books and have begun my journey with the suttas, and am greatly enjoying it.
I’ve ran into a snag though. I’m reading the books on my Kindle, and to do so you have to upload the ePubs either through https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle, or you can e-mail them to your Kindle, where they will be converted to whatever proprietary format Amazon uses, and then added to your library, ready to be delivered to your device.
The ten Bhante Sujato Editions of the Sutta Pitaka have uploaded and converted flawlessly, and I am enjoying them on my Kindle now. But the Ajahn Brahmali translation of the Vinaya does not work. It’ll upload, say it’s converting for a long time, and then eventually fail. I’ve tried it atleast 4 or 5 times now, with two different published versions of the book, with always the same results.
After some Google research, I found that this isn’t particularly uncommon when it comes to ePubs and Amazon. The biggest offender seems to be ePub files that are DRM protected, which I know (assuming? But I’m rather certain) isn’t the case here.
I’ve found this diagnostic tool https://kindle-epub-fix.netlify.app/ which allows you to check if your ePub file will be accepted by Amazon, and the Vinaya file passes with no issues detected.
Alternatively, I ran it through an online ePub validator, and it threw all sorts of errors, but so did the other books, and they upload just fine.
I tried the send to Kindle web interface and after 10 minutes it’s still processing and not yet received on the device. I don’t have much hope for it working at this point.
In theory the conversion should not be complicated, however it’s a huge, and somewhat complicated, book. So It wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere things got snagged up.
I did the conversion to AZW3 in Calibre and then loaded it directly onto my Kindle and the file opened fine. So while not ideal, there is a way to get the job done.
Running the epub check in Sigil, I found lots of individual warning, but only three unique issues:
The first one is a non-issue. There should be no problem with h7 unless somehow the online converter is trying to construct a table of contents, but I doubt that is happening.
The second error with the ol being incomplete should have been solved already, but again, I doubt that could cause any problem with conversion, even online.
And the last is a bad link. And I can’t see how that would break the conversion. But it should be fixed I guess. @HongDa or Bhante @sujato ?
Calibre Ebook editor gives multiple of these errors, not sure if they are connected to the conversion issues you’re having:
This HTML file is larger than 260 KB. Too large HTML files can cause performance problems on some e-book readers. Consider splitting this file into smaller sections.
I was actually able to get it to work by first converting to awz3 as snowbird suggested, and then converting back to epub, and then using send to kindle, strangely enough. So something is breaking in the conversion on Amazon’s end it seems. It doesn’t appear to be the size.
I don’t currently have a computer, so I’m doing all of this on my phone, and I didn’t think I had the ability to directly sideload files (after some more research, I now know that there is a kindle app that you can share files with directly from your file explorer. This is an old 4th gen kindle that hasn’t had very much use since I got it, so I’m not super familiar with the ins and outs). Amazon has phased out mobi support for the Send to Kindle service, it’s mostly just epub and pdf, etc. along with some various html and txt formats. Anything mobi, awz, awz3, etc. has to be sideloaded now.
Like I said though, I did get it to work, and it is now on my kindle. Though there’s nothing wrong with the device per se (it’s something like 13 years old and it works lol), and I’m glad to be able to find a use for it, if I’m serious about this I may eventually upgrade to something less restrictive and proprietary so that I don’t have to bother with the conversions. Maybe a Kobo Libra 2 or something. But that’s for another day.
Thank you everyone for your help, I appreciate it.
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I hope this is the appropriate place to post this anomaly I saw while trying to download Ven. Brahmali’s book on Vinaya. Please read the highlighted part of the screenshot below which I believe is a minor
Here’s what I’m thinking. Now that the publication process is established, maybe if there is sufficient need we can look into creating smaller EPUB files. But we need a careful and detailed spec to proceed with. Not only are there the extant collections but we have remain bulletproof for possible new collections in the future (eg agamas). So it needs some careful investigation and weighing up the advantages as well as inevitable technical debt.
I realize that it’s a bummer that the epub send to kindle pipeline doesn’t work. Especially for this book since it is probably more likely that monastics would need a laptop-free way of getting this to their Kindle. But I I don’t know if that’s, by itself, a reason to make a new process for generating the books. Who knows what Amazon will do in the future. And you’d have to first test if the same data split into smaller books would work through their converter That’s really the primary thing to figure out.
That said, Having the entire Vinaypitaka as a single epub file is problematic for other reasons. I mean, you don’t offer the entire Suttapitaka as a single epub file, eh? I’m not sure why you decided to do that for the Vinaya.
