Savory app = double + good fore Kindle 2 owners.

In my last post I mentioned that before I bought my K1 (original Kindle) I was seriously thinking about buying a Sony eReader 505.  One thing that I did not mention in the last post was that the Sony was the device  that embraced the open .EPUB format (in fact it embraced damn near every eBook format beside Amazon’s proprietary .mobi format). 

As of this writing the Kindle still does not support .EPUB, also known as the “open book” format, which is the most used format to publish digital/eBooks in.  This was a rather large disappointment to me, but I was able to overlook it because I thought that at some point someone would figure out a way to get .EPUB stuff onto the Kindle. 

Today I saw this post over on O’Reilly Radar about an app called Savory and I smiled. 

Savory the first native Kindle application. Savory is an open source epub and PDF converter that actually runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn’t add anything that you couldn’t do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline.

I can all ready convert .EPUB stuff into a format that the Kindle can read, but I have to do it on a separate device (laptop, netbook, desk top, etc).  Savory is super cool because now a user can do that sort of thing on the Kindle. 

It is too bad that Savory will not work on my K1, but that’s OK.  It is a  big step in the right direction for eBooks. 

If you have a Kindle 2, you really should stop reading this post and get start on downloading / installing Savory on your Kindle. 

-N