Show HN: Kindling – reverse-engineered kindlegen, ~7,000x faster in Rust

Category: devtools

Tags: ebook-tools, reverse-engineering, rust

Score: 7.5/10 (Innovation: 6, Technical: 8, Documentation: 9, Utility: 7)

Kindling is a Rust-based replacement for Amazon's deprecated kindlegen tool, reverse-engineered to build Kindle dictionary (.mobi) files from OPF/HTML source. It's interesting because it achieves ~7,000x speed improvements for large dictionaries while maintaining full compatibility with Kindle hardware, and it bypasses undocumented limits of the original tool with a simpler, more maintainable indexing approach.

Target audience: ebook-publishers, linguists, digital-archivists

Repository: https://github.com/ciscoriordan/kindling · Rust · MIT

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