Blank "Contents" Page in .mobi Compile

The .mobi Compile of my novel seems to be working perfectly, except for one problem: Immediately following the cover image, which is on the first page, there’s an empty page that says Contents at the top.

How do I get rid of that?

Just to be clear, I don’t want to use a Table of Contents at all. It takes up page space in Amazon’s Look Inside display, and it’s not needed for a novel. I want the .mobi file to go directly from the cover image to the page containing my front matter.

I’m gonna have to bump this query. 39 views in 5 days, and not a single reply. It seems a simple enough question…

Just now I tried editing the .mobi output in Calibre, and that didn’t work worth a darn. I’ll shoot a message up to their forum, on the off-chance that Calibre might actually be able to solve the problem. But really, Scrivener ought to be able to manage this.

How is your novel structured in the Binder?
Ebook readers automatically create a ToC for navigation, based on the structure.

If the novel is simply a set of text files (one per chapter) under Manuscript, Scrivener creates a blank Contents page. The e-reader (the Kindle app on my PC) doesn’t add anything to this. I can get Scrivener to generate a TOC by tucking the chapter files in my own Output Folder (within Manuscript), but that’s not what I want. I don’t want to add an actual TOC, I want to get rid of the Contents entirely.

The blank Contents page is not being created by Kindle. I just now checked. If a novel (I’m looking at Nobody’s Perfect by Donald Westlake) has no TOC in the file, Kindle creates one in its sidebar – but Kindle does not ADD a page to the book file itself. When there’s a Contents page in the book file, it’s because the program that generated the book file added one.

Are you using the new Kindle software to create the mobi file and to check the output? KindleGen is outdated And I don’t remember the name of the new version. Check at the Kindle site.
And don’t trust the Kindle reader on a PC to show correct results.

Kindle Previewer.

Kindle Previewer seems to be a reader, not a .mobi generator. The version of kindlegen I’m seeing on the Amazon website (2.9) seems to be rather ancient – its compatibility list includes XP, but not Windows 10.

So my question is this: Is Kindle Previewer the new kindlegen? Or is kindlegen not actually outdated? I’m rather confused.

It’s nice to know about Kindle Previewer … but when I view the .mobi file in Kindle Previewer, I see exactly what I expected to see, namely, Scrivener has produced an entirely empty Table of Contents. Viz, to wit:

From my perusal of prior posts with the same question, I suspect that Windows Scrivener 1.9 always generates a TOC for mobi, and there’s no way to disable it. In the past, L&L suggested to delete the unwanted TOC post-compile, using software like Calibre.

That’s the bad news. The possible good news is that, based on the options available in the Windows v3 beta Compile, it appears that v3 will include a checkbox to disable TOC generation. Unfortunately, I tried but couldn’t test whether that is truly the case, as compile for mobi kept failing for me in the beta. So it’s possible I’m misunderstanding what that checkbox is for.

While L&L certainly does answer questions on these forums, they are primarily for peer-to-peer support. If you want a definitive answer from L&L support, contact them directly: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/contact-us

I wish I had better advice for you. :blush:

By the way, I really like your book’s cover. :slight_smile:

Best,
Jim

Yes, Kindle Previewer is the new way to create mobi files. Kindle recomend that you don’t make the mobi yourself but create the manuscript the way you want, preferably as .docx, and then let Kindle Previewer create the mobi file.

Kindle Previewer includes as part of the package an updated version of KindleGen that is not available separately. If Previewer is installed, Scrivener will detect it and use that version of KindleGen to convert the .epub file to .mobi.

P.S. In the future when you’re asking for help, don’t be so quick to discount the answers you get. A quick search of “Kindle Previewer” on this forum would have led you to a number of other threads where you would have seen the same answer explained.