Back in February of this year, Amazon released a software program for Windows computers called Kindle Convert that is designed to convert scanned documents, PDFs, and printed books into Kindle ebooks.
On the surface that sounds like a good plan, but reading through the reviews at Amazon it appears that Kindle Convert software is a bigger flop than the Fire Phone.
Overall Kindle Convert has a rating of just 2.1 stars with 23 reviews.
13% are five star reviews (only 3), 22% are three star reviews, and a whopping 65% of reviewers give the software a 1 or 2 star rating.
There are lots of complaints about text rendering improperly (in a number of different ways) after conversion, and a number of odd formatting issues. The OCR sounds like it needs some work. Things like images, tables, and TOC are unpredictable.
Kindle Convert costs $49—the high price doesn’t help matters. It was only $19 when it first launched, and it didn’t even garner much interest then.
You gotta wonder if Amazon intends to continue developing the program to make it better or if they are just going to let it wither on the vine…
Okay, let me see if I have this correct. I can pay Amazon $49 to get a program to convert documents into Kindle format ebooks. This $49 program 13% positive reviews. Or I can download calibre, which has 93% positive reviews, for free. Additionally calibre can convert documents in any of 22 input formats into one of 17 different ebook formats, including Kindle.
So the real question is why would anybody pay Amazon for this product?
You can see at the link below the best software for converting pdf files both images and ocr to kindle and other e-readers.
http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/
It is completely free, and works like charm.