LDS Scriptures for the Amazon Kindle

I have looked at the Mobile Scriptures project on the LDS Tech Wiki, and found several devices listed for development including the Android, Blackbery, and iPhone, but not the Amazon Kindle. There are some commercially developed versions of LDS scriptures for the Kindle, but they do not appear to be of very good quality, and some users have complained of their poor navigation. Why is the Kindle being neglected by the LDS developer community? I think I would prefer to carry my scriptures to Church on a Kindle than the massive volumes that are available on paper and print. The Kindle is more readable than the iPhone or Android. Of course Apple is expected to bring out a tablet PC shortly which may be a good replacement for the Kindle, and the existing iPhone app may work on that one. We will have to wait and see.

I think the project idea is a good one, and technically it would seem easy to implement. I think all you would have to do is transform the scripture content into the proprietary Kindle file format, and let the Kindle book reader software do the rest of the functionality and features.

mkmurray wrote:I think the project idea is a good one, and technically it would seem easy to implement. I think all you would have to do is transform the scripture content into the proprietary Kindle file format, and let the Kindle book reader software do the rest of the functionality and features.

No need. Just download these MOBI files and copy them to your Kindle. My mom has a Kindle, so I got these files for her. The cool thing about the Kindle is that it supports MANY book file formats.

http://members.cox.net/palm-os/kindle_scriptures.zip

A lot of content is available on lds.org that works great on Kindle.

TB

mkmurray wrote:I think the project idea is a good one, and technically it would seem easy to implement. I think all you would have to do is transform the scripture content into the proprietary Kindle file format, and let the Kindle book reader software do the rest of the functionality and features.

Thanks for the suggestion. If it is easy to develop and the tools easy to use I wouldn’t mind having a go at developing it myself. I will have a look into that.

TechnoBabel wrote:No need. Just download these MOBI files and copy them to your Kindle. My mom has a Kindle, so I got these files for her. The cool thing about the Kindle is that it supports MANY book file formats.

http://members.cox.net/palm-os/kindle_scriptures.zip

A lot of content is available on lds.org that works great on Kindle.

TB

I think there is a “need”. “No need” is a bit premature. I don’t have a Kindle right now, because if I buy one it would only be for use with LDS scriptures in Church, and I am not going to unless I am convinced that there is a good implementation LDS scriptures on it that I can feel comfortable in using. The files you had sent were not all that impressive. I tried it on a PC implementation of the Kindle. There are several MOBI readers for the PC that can be downloaded for free, including an implementation of the Kindle from Amazon. The MOBI files looks very primitive and not easily navigable or intuitive. I it is nothing like as intuitive or sophisticated as the implementation of the scriptures on the iPhone for example. That is the kind of thing I was looking for on the Kindle.

Before starting this thread I had looked around for a good implementation of LDS scriptures on the Kindle. I found a commercial one here which did not have very good reviews. The users were complaining mainly about the poor navigation. Since then I have found another implementation here which seems to have better reviews, but still does not appear to be all that impressive. I think there is plenty of room for knowledgeable LDS to start a project for a decent implementation of LDS scriptures on all type of eReaders such as the Sony eBook, as well as the Kindle.

Yes, and that is what I figured with any existing scripture implementations out there. If this project idea was accepted and sponsored by the Church (perhaps on the LDSTech Wiki), then the Church would provide you with an official scripture content set that is organized in an XML schema they developed. I have personally written XSL templates to transform this content into a different format for one of the mobile scriptures projects on the Wiki.

I thought the Kindle had a single user interface for reading content that was commonly used by everything. I guess that shows what I know about it. Maybe I'm just not as picky as you guys.

TB

TechnoBabel wrote:I thought the Kindle had a single user interface for reading content that was commonly used by everything. I guess that shows what I know about it. Maybe I'm just not as picky as you guys.

TB

Well I think that's true, but I imagine their are certain tags or notifiers in the content you can use to notify the Kindle software of navigation abilities or other extra features that can only be found in the Amazon's proprietary file format (AZW). If you're gonna make content available to the Kindle, you might as well put the content in it's specific format to gain the extra features the software has to offer. I imagine while the Kindle can consume MOBI content, it just displays content as is and has no extra features. I could be wrong.

Ethem wrote:Why is the Kindle being neglected by the LDS developer community?

I suspect the answer to that is that the LDS developer community is rather small and there are a large number of reader formats out there. Given the high cost of that particular reader, I can understand why various developers may feel that the time is not ripe for working on that platform.

RussellHltn wrote:I suspect the answer to that is that the LDS developer community is rather small and there are a large number of reader formats out there. Given the high cost of that particular reader, I can understand why various developers may feel that the time is not ripe for working on that platform.

It is cheaper than iPhone or Android, and crucially, it is much more readable. It is just right from my point of view for taking it to the Gospel Doctrine class!—provided that it is easily navigable, and you can quickly find what you are looking for. And for the cost, you can read thousands of other books on it. Books formatted for the Kindle are a lot cheaper than ordinary paper books.

In addition to the Kindle, there's Sony's offering. There are pros and cons to each. I'm just saying there's a lot of incompatible formats out there. Developers tend to gravitate to the leaders.

RussellHltn wrote:In addition to the Kindle, there's Sony's offering. There are pros and cons to each. I'm just saying there's a lot of incompatible formats out there. Developers tend to gravitate to the leaders.

On that note, at my work we have been talking about putting our client's content on the Kindle and/or Sony reader. One of the major obstacles is indeed incompatible file formats, as Amazon has it's proprietary format (AZW) and Sony is pushing a more standardized and open industry format (EPUB).

mkmurray wrote:On that note, at my work we have been talking about putting our client's content on the Kindle and/or Sony reader. One of the major obstacles is indeed incompatible file formats, as Amazon has it's proprietary format (AZW) and Sony is pushing a more standardized and open industry format (EPUB).

Why should that be an obstacle? You chose one, and work with that one. Are they that hard to implement? Are there no easy conversion tools between them? The merits of these readers is that they are actually “eBooks”. The screen technology they use is different from normal PCs or handhelds. They are designed to create for you electronically the same experience (as far as possible) as that of reading a normal paper book. So they shouldn’t really be compared with those other kinds of devices. In any case, I am waiting for Apple to unveil their new much rumoured tablet PC next week. Some of the rumours are that it can do the same thing, only in color! Apparently it is also going to be very expensive. We will find out next week I guess.

Ethem wrote:Why should that be an obstacle? You chose one, and work with that one. Are they that hard to implement? Are there no easy conversion tools between them? The merits of these readers is that they are actually “eBooks”. The screen technology they use is different from normal PCs or handhelds. They are designed to create for you electronically the same experience (as far as possible) as that of reading a normal paper book. So they shouldn’t really be compared with those other kinds of devices.

It sounds as though you have it all figured out. Since you seem to have it all figured out, please keep us updated as to how you are progressing as you volunteer your time to make this project happen.

TB

TechnoBabel wrote:It sounds as though you have it all figured out. Since you seem to have it all figured out, please keep us updated as to how you are progressing as you volunteer your time to make this project happen.

TB

Yeah, I mean I would suggest that you see if the Church is interested in sponsoring the project here on the LDSTech Wiki. You may find a few other Community members interested in joining you. I know I might look into see how I can help if the project gets more off the ground. It'd be fun to learn some of these eBook formats.

The person you probably want to email would be church employee Tom Welch (tomw): http://tech.lds.org/forum/member.php?u=1

mkmurray wrote:Yeah, I mean I would suggest that you see if the Church is interested in sponsoring the project here on the LDSTech Wiki. You may find a few other Community members interested in joining you. I know I might look into see how I can help if the project gets more off the ground. It'd be fun to learn some of these eBook formats.

The person you probably want to email would be church employee Tom Welch (tomw): http://tech.lds.org/forum/member.php?u=1

Okay, just for your info, I finally decided to fork out some money and buy this edition of LDS scriptures for the Kindle, to try it out on the Kindle for PC software to see how it works; and it is not all that bad. The navigation is about as good as it is likely to get on the Kindle. The Kindle is not a computer, so you can’t do sophisticated programming on it. The flip side of that is that creating content for the Kindle is a piece of cake. There are free tools available that allow you to create content for the Kindle out of any kind of text file, HTML file, .DOC file, etc. with minimum of effort. The formatting of the text is not the way I would have done it myself; but it is acceptable. For those who are interested in trying it out, I would say it is worth the money spent. And if you buy it once you don’t need to buy it twice to put it on a real Kindle. It goes into your Amazon account and you can download it again as many times as you want to put it on another device. The downloaded file goes into a folder in your Documents folder. You can save that too, and it should be possible to load it up into another Kindle by a USB connection.

Another advantage of the Kindle is that the battery on them lasts a lot longer. You can read War and Peace on it without recharging the battery—or so they say! The screen is not backlit like a PC or iPhone. It uses “e-Ink” technology which makes it behave like paper, and you can shine a light on it to read it. There is a bigger version of the Kindle 2 called the DX, which looks very impressive but more expensive to buy. Creating content for the Kindle using the tools provided is easy; but doing it for the scriptures would be tedious and time consuming, because to navigate it properly you would have to create links for each book, chapter, and verse. Good luck for those who want to try it!

Ethem wrote:The Kindle is not a computer, so you can’t do sophisticated programming on it.

Your comment reminded me of a short presentation that I saw last year at OSCON. The segment of the video that is relevant to this subject starts shortly after 2 minutes into the video and is about 5 minutes in length.


http://blip.tv/file/2391051

TechnoBabel wrote:No need. Just download these MOBI files and copy them to your Kindle. My mom has a Kindle, so I got these files for her. The cool thing about the Kindle is that it supports MANY book file formats.

http://members.cox.net/palm-os/kindle_scriptures.zip

A lot of content is available on lds.org that works great on Kindle.

TB

Thank you so much for the link I was beginning to think I had made a mistake buying the Kindle. Not now these scriptrues are very easy to navigate plus a few extras thanks again for your post. :p

I'm curious how Standard Works LLC can continue to sell copyrighted text like the footnotes in the scriptures, Topical Guide, Bible Dictionary, Guide to the Scriptures, Hymns, Children's Songbook, etc. on all these devices. I would think the Church would not allow them to charge for this content. Is this not the case? Has the policy changed?

The above discussion seems to be centered around finding a version of the scriptures for Kindle or recommending a paid version.

Instead let's take advantage of the resources the church provides.

The church provides a complete copy of the standard works with links in EPUB format which is natively incompatible with Kindle. However, there are many converters on the market some of which are free.

I recommend using Calibre to convert the church provided epub version to the Kindle format. Calibre is free and easy to use although conversion of the scriptures takes a few minutes.

Download Calibre (free) here:
http://calibre-ebook.com/

Download the church provided EPUB file here:
http://lds.org/scriptures?lang=eng

I just wish I could get the scriptures in German on my Kindle. Get them on my razr

darrylglissmeyer wrote:I just wish I could get the scriptures in German on my Kindle.

You didn't specify what kind of Kindle you have. On a Kindle Fire, you can use the Gospel Library for Android application (click here for info on Kindle Fire apps). On a regular Kindle, you might try the EPUB versions.