So a year or so ago, I purchased an e-book version of Elixir in Action after having run through most of Learn You Some Erlang and discovering Elixir which I instantly fell in love with but had no immediate use for. Not wanting to leverage this awesome thing I just found solely (or at all really) as yet another web framework, I did not dive right in to Phoenix and still have yet to. So I needed something to sate my desire to ingrain Elixir into my brain. After 20 or so exercises on exercism.io I looked for some book action to learn the finer points of all things not Phoenix.

Enter 'Elixir in action', great book. Loved it, soft intro and gets deeper quickly. However, on my kindle keyboard, the oft used images of code, instead of text elsewhere in the book, are way too faded and low contrast and fail to show up in a reasonable and readable manner. So I downloaded calibre to see what damage I could do, as I know nothing about e-books at all. After a few failed conversions to what calibre considers an editable format, failed as in, I didn't like how the text looked after putting it back on the kindle. I went ahead and just opened the book editor, woo a simple image editor, normalize and sharpen looks good. Almost 300 images and no bulk apply to all images feature I could find… WELLLLLL

Then I shifted to converting it to a zip ImageMagick to the rescue.

mogrify -level 50x100% *.jpeg

Converted it into an azw3. Place on kindle, massive text formatting problems. Ok Ok I think to myself must be a good way of going about this. Locate calibre plugin for KindleUnpack, discover it is a wrapper locate the appropriate repo here. Unpack the original book, do that ImageMagick, have calibre build me an azw3. Sigh, much less in the horrible text department, but still I would consider unreadable, those images tho. Ok Ok time to dive into some more conversion options

• Disable font size rescaling
• Use Cybook G3 output and input profile as the resolution is right for my kindle
• Replace detect chapters at Xpath with /
• Replace insert page breaks before Xpath with /

Hit blend….BAM a readable book text and images all looking pretty good. Mission success. Now I can finally get through chapter 5 after brushing back through chapter 4 and finish a book I bought forever ago.

• kindle
• journal