It seems that The Boy Genius Report has gotten some leaked photos of the next generation Kindle. The full article is available here, although there is very little information from their source besides the photos. Apparently the next generation of Kindle doesn’t have an SD card slot.
This is the second part of my continuing exploration into the Kindle Topaz file format. This will probably not make much sense until you read the first part.
Topaz files contain a set of headers and corresponding blocks. Each header and block has a type. It appears that there are seven types: DICT, DKEY, GLYPHS, IMG, METADATA, OTHER and PAGE. For each header there are one or more corresponding blocks, and the header provides the number, location and sizes of the blocks, and probably some other information I haven’t decoded yet. Topaz files seem to only ever contain a single block for the DICT, DKEY, METADATA and OTHER types. There are typically many blocks for the GLYPHS, IMG and PAGE types. Hardly surprising given that GLYPHS contains font data, IMG contains image data, and PAGE contains book text.
I’ve recently been playing with the Amazon Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader. Despite looking like a throwback to ’80s computing, it’s actually a surprisingly good product. It’s by far the best ebook reader on the market, and transparent wireless purchasing and downloading is a killer feature. If they can improve their product design and invest in future e-Ink improvements they will own this space as it grows. Printed books have some time yet, but the writing is on the wall. Music paved the way, video will follow as internet bandwidth increases, and books will *eventually* go digital.
Beyond reading books on the thing, I’ve been looking at how the Kindle stores its books. Amazon uses two primary file formats for Kindle ebooks; a modified form of Mobipocket and something called Topaz.
