It turns out that the best new feature of the updated Kindle app–the ability to open external Kindle formatted titles from an email or a website–isn’t so great after all. My hope is that this is a bug and not a deliberate restriction, but we’ll have to wait for another update to find out.
What’s supposed to happen is this: you find an .azw or .mobi file online or included as an email attachment, and when you tap it you get an option to open that file in your Kindle app.
What actually happens on my iOS 4.2 devices, depending on format:
Mobi – works as promised, yay
Azw – on iPad, works only if the file isn’t from Amazon (more on that below); on iPhone, causes app to hang or crash, and after a force quit and restart the title appears but you can’t open it.
While that sounds pretty clearly like a bug, what’s interesting about the .azw issue is that on the iPad, third party .azw files do indeed open. It’s only non-DRMed .azw files from Amazon that cause failure.
Since plenty of indie authors now sell their Kindle titles on Amazon without DRM, this is unfortunate. It certainly would help prevent readers from sharing unlocked Amazon purchases, though, which is why I suspect it’s a deliberate restriction that wasn’t ironed out before the update went live.
In the meantime, stick with .mobi files if you want to open them on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Thanks to Devini for the heads up!
Via Chris Walters’ BookSprung blog
For me, biggest news is that Kindle for iDevice became Dropbox client for mobi files.
Obvious question…
What happens if you rename a non-DRM AZW file to have a .mobi extension?
JR
@John: In my tests, renaming a DRM-free .azw file from the Kindle store to .mobi results in a successful sideload, but the app still won’t open it. Instead it produces the following error message: “Error – Please remove the book from your device and redownload it from your archived items.”
In general, I’m having inconsistent results with sideloading non-Amazon .azw files on the iPhone app. The very file I tested yesterday (when it failed) opened just fine today, both when I renamed it to .mobi and when I changed it back to .azw.
Bottom line: it looks like the app won’t open sideloaded Kindle titles if they’re from the Kindle store, even when renamed.
Final update (I hope!): I re-tested multiple .azw files tonight, both with and without DRM, from Amazon and from Manybooks.net. I also restarted my iPhone 3GS and iPad before proceeding with these latest tests. I’m able to consistently repeat my tests now and get the same results each time, so I’m going to assume that the issues I described in my post were one-off glitches and/or errors on my part.
Final results:
– Mobi is fine
– Azw without DRM is fine, regardless of where it comes from
– Azw with DRM from Amazon Kindle Store will load but not open
Finally, Azw files over about a megabyte in size won’t download properly in the iOS Mail app, so the device won’t recognize them as Kindle files and will refuse to open them in the Kindle app. You have to sideload them via another app like Dropbox or use iTunes File Sharing.