Kindle books in AZW6 format are converted without images

[Andreas Krell]

Some ebooks for the Kindle are split in two files. Looking to the Kindle "documents" directory one find an *.azw3 file and in the subfolder of that azw3 file an azw6 file, which is bigger cause it contains the pictures. When converting that ebook with Calibre, one get only the text without the pictures and the cover page is black and white instead of color.

- Calibre 2.20, Windows 7 64bit
- ebook Example (DRM free): http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00TDKYR98?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o04_

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

calibre does not support this kind of book, which I'm guessing is some
kind of new format from Amazon for fixed layout books like comics. Given
that calibre is only designed to work with individual files not
pairs/collections of files, directly adding support for it is not
possible.

Reverse engineering the azw6 format is not worth the effort for me
personally. If some one else wants to implement it, I will be happy to
supply any needed guidance. If so, re-open the ticket and we can discuss
it. It appears to be a fairly simple PDB database, so it should not be
hard, however, given the small number of such books, this is not worth
it for me currently, that may change in the future.

 status wontfix

[Jon Bobson (perrinaz)]

This affects me. I will try to contact you on IRC.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

I'm not on IRC. If you want to discuss it, either use this ticket or contact me by email (my email address is at the top of mpst of the source code files in calibre).

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Oh and before I forget, this is likely kindle device specific, so you can bypass it by simply using the Manage my Content page in your amazon account to download the book for transfer via USB. That will most likely give you a regular azw3 file.

[Chris Le Sueur (thefishface)]

The one book I have from the Kindle store has this azw6 file in its sidecar folder. I know virtually nothing about Calibre's architecture, but I do note that the Kindle driver has support for apnx files which are also in the sidecar folder. This might have no bearing on how easy it is to make the convert tool look there for data, though.

Still, this would be a useful feature for people who DeDRM all their books through Calibre, for instance.