wiltonsr / kindlegen-docker

Amazon's KindleGen dockerized. KindleGen is a proprietary tool provided by Amazon to be used to convert source files to AZW format and KF8 be used on the Amazon Kindle reader.

Kindlegen Docker

Since KindleGen is no longer available for download, this Docker Image is based on a version web archived here.

Usage

Running

The container has kindlegen binary as default ENTRYPOINT. So just run:

docker run wiltonsr/kindlegen

And you will get the following output:

*************************************************************
 Amazon kindlegen(Linux) V2.9 build 1028-0897292
 A command line e-book compiler
 Copyright Amazon.com and its Affiliates 2014
*************************************************************

Usage : kindlegen [filename.opf/.htm/.html/.epub/.zip or directory] [-c0 or -c1 or c2] [-verbose] [-western] [-o <file name>]
Note:
   zip formats are supported for XMDF and FB2 sources
   directory formats are supported for XMDF sources
Options:
   -c0: no compression
   -c1: standard DOC compression
   -c2: Kindle huffdic compression
   -o <file name>: Specifies the output file name. Output file will be created in the same directory as that of input file. <file name> should not contain directory path.
   -verbose: provides more information during ebook conversion
   -western: force build of Windows-1252 book
   -releasenotes: display release notes
   -gif: images are converted to GIF format (no JPEG in the book)
   -locale <locale option> : To display messages in selected language
      en: English
      de: German
      fr: French
      it: Italian
      es: Spanish
      zh: Chinese
      ja: Japanese
      pt: Portuguese
      ru: Russian
      nl: Dutch

Running with Volume

The container uses the /source directory as WORKDIR and kindlegen will always run from this location. It can be mapped for use with relative file paths to pass parameters and input files to kindlegen:

# pwd
# /my/dir

# ls -l /my/dir
# input.epub

docker run \
  -v $(pwd):/source \
  wiltonsr/kindlegen input.epub -o output.mobi

# ls -l /my/dir
# input.epub
# output.mobi

Running and Maintaining Permissions

By default, the container runs as the root user. This makes the generated files also have root user permission. To avoid this behavior it is possible to override the USER instruction by passing the --user option.

docker run \
  --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
  -v $(pwd):/source \
  wiltonsr/kindlegen input.epub -o output.mobi