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Latest installment of an informative series on self-publishing
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Comments
Comment on eBook "standards"
The "Kindle" format actually belonged to the French "Mobipocket" eBook company, although Amazon.com has since purchased the company and appears to be letting it twist slowly in the wind. It's essentially a crippled epub*, and they appear to be set on keeping it, since they've recently announced Kindle Format 8, which updates the "Mobi"/Kindle AZW "standard" with more XHTML and CSS support, which just happens to match the capabilities of the "new" Kindle Fire, a colour e-reader.
This means, of course, that your Amazon.com eBooks will have to be reformatted if one wants to take advantage of the new formatting capabilities. This may actually be a good thing, since the Kindle is notorious for being able to take what appears to be good code and mucking it up, as anyone who's purchased Kindle books knows.
The Amazon.com publishing tool will apparently produce two files these days, and somehow (either by user choice or automagically) download the appropriate file format based on the device being downloaded to.
Here's the Amazon.com overview of KF8:
Here's a list of the new tags and attributes:
Puddin'
* Amazon.com actually supports epub as an input to their conversion scheme, which is actually a good idea, since Amazon.com "suggests" having an HTML-based Table of Contents as well as a "Logical" NCX TOC. The NCX (ePub) TOC drives the links that Amazon.com places in the Kindle file that allows one to go directly to the TOC, the Beginning of the book (where one would ordinarily start reading) and the end.
If possible, either you or your publisher should produce an ePub document (taking into consideration the Kindle limitations) as part of the publishing process.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I've just started putting
I've just started putting Kindle formats together using a kindleised epub through KindleGen.
What a massive pain. Stripped HTML commands, half of the CSS being used, and italics/bold not working as they should..
Looks like the new structure is Bringing Kindle up to the level of Microsoft's .Lit format. At lease Kindlegen should reformat the epub properly now. And I can reset the kindle XML/XSL-HTML output.
Shaun
P.S.
On Kindle, the Alexandria Project doesn't have a logical TOC, which means that all the Kindle navigation tools aren't available. Ordinarily, the "five-way" button allows one to quickly skip through a book by chapter, so it's easy to quickly navigate to a particular point. Also, the beginning of a carefully-formatted book is usually the start of reading, skipping the cover, front matter, and HTML-based table of contents. This will often be a prologue or the first page of Chapter One, whatever one calls it.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Love the Kindle
And to be honest outside of school texts I've never seen the need for a table of contents. Just a few more pages I have to click through to start reading so if there isn't one I won't miss it.
Commentator
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For a long book
or a reference book, many readers like to skip around. I know I like to skip to the last few chapters of novels to see if I like how it's going to wind up, because I hate the sorts of books where everyone dies, or where there doesn't seem to be a resolution at all. I also like to skip through chapters, especially self-published works, to see if the story structure seems reasonable and if the ratio of correctly-spelt words to running text is very high before I start reading. For a reference work, I like to look at the chapter headings and the index (and yes, it's perfectly feasible to include both as clickable links in a Kindle book, including return -- I've even seen footnotes) to see whether the coverage seems reasonable and useful.
With very long books, being able to reference past chapters is valuable as well, for any number of reasons. If one gives the chapters mnemonic names, skipping thus can be easy and sometimes fun. How many, for example, fail to recognise "A Long-expected Party" as the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring?
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style