Amazon Kindle is one of the most loved eBook readers worldwide. What started almost as an experiment in 2009 has now become the highest selling eBook reader worldwide. The name Kindle is derived from the concept of lighting a fire. Amazon wanted to offer the world of book lovers that would excite them intellectually and this is where the name came from.
Kindle was launched as a single device, but now it has a wide catalogue of products. The modern readers are Android-based with colour, LCD screens. What makes the Kindle different from the other eBook readers is its clarity and its free flowing nature, elements that make readers feel as if they are turning the pages of an actual book.
The Kindle file format is one of the reasons why Kindle is such a better device. It doesn’t support EPUB, but its own proprietary file formats AZW and KF8.
The AZW file format was used in the earlier Kindle devices. This file format is similar to the Mobipocket format except for a different serial number scheme. In its DRM formatting, it uses * instead of $. When an eBook gets downloaded, the user cannot see the AZW files because the books are delivered over Whispernet, the Amazon wireless system. The AZW format, however, lacks some of the Mobipocket features, JavaScript for instance.
When Kindle Fire was launched in the latter half of 2011, Amazon used a new file format called KF8. This file format supports a subset of CSS3 and HTML5. There are also some other non-standard features included in this file format. A container is used to store any new data. The container can also store a document with MOBI content. This is possible due to the limited backwards compatibility built into the KF8 file format.
Thanks to these proprietary file formats, Amazon Kindle is one of its kind. While tablets are most popular in India, a certain section of urban India is slowly getting hooked to reading books on digital devices. And most of these people cannot think beyond Amazon Kindle.
Image credit: Pavel P. on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Profile_Pic_Moumita.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Moumita Goswami is a full-time homemaker and a passionate writer. She stays in Pune with her husband and daughter. After giving up working, she started writing about five years ago and can now be seen using her computer keyboard almost all the time. An MA in Psychology from Calcutta University, Moumita has spent time in Kolkata, Delhi and now Pune. For Moumita, writing started as a sudden chance but she soon discovered her likeness for it. And now she has developed a passion for writing and hardly any day passes without her scribbling a few lines. She dreams of publishing her own book one day and is working towards it.
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