Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
I am never going to use a binary blob like kindlegen for conversion:
1. It only supports 3 platforms, calibre runs on BSDs and ARM as well
2. I have no way of knowing exactly what kindlegen does
3. I have no way of fixing bugs in kindlegen
Producing KF8 doesn't seem to be insuperably difficult, I'll get to it eventually.
My suggestion was to employ a plugin that uses kindlegen as an interim approach, until you can swat that format like the pesky bug that it is. I agree that (1) means it is not a general solution, but (2) and (3) are just NIH. It's pretty obvious that (a) calibre uses ePub as a common-denominator type of format, and (b) mobi, as a proprietary format owned by Amazon, will be continually changing. Taking a software engineering approach to supporting Amazon devices would seem to make more sense than continually running to reverse engineer what they are doing and playing catchup. Kindlegen turns ePub into amazon mobi, so why duplicate it? I realize there may be platform and license questions, but the flip dismissal (by theducks) of the concept because kindlegen is not open source is silly. Does calibre run on windows? Does calibre use any windows functions? Do you know what windows does? Can you fix bugs in windows? Is windows open source? Why doesn't calibre ship with it's own open source operating system? I'm being facetious of course, but you probably see the point I'm making.