[OS X TeX] Configuring LaTeX produced PDF's for a Kindle

[Louis Talman]

On Jan 4, 2011, at 7:50 AM, William Adams wrote:

> How ePub got approved w/o support for MathML I'll never understand.

Kindle books are .mobi, not ePub.  Amazon does offer Kindle users a free service for converting .pdf to Kindle format---see the documentation for Kindle regarding this.  It works fairly well for text, but it scrambles mathematical symbols, resulting in unreadable chaos.

The .mobi format is probably robust enough to display mathematics correctly:  Many standard mathematics books are available in Kindle format---but they're almost as expensive as the real books, and I haven't bought any simply to see what they look like...

Maybe the thing to do is for the TeX community to approach Amazon with a request that they implement a Kindle service for converting .dvi to readable e-text.  (The carrot would be that many TeX-users might then self-publish mathematics via the Kindle Store.)  Or maybe (and to my mind, preferably) one or more of the wizards that frequent this forum will write a .div t0 .mobi conversion program under GNU licensing.  (I would consider it myself, but I flunked out of Hogwarts and so remain a mere muggle.)

--Lou Talman
  Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences
  Metropolitan State College of Denver

  <http://rowdy.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl>