I have a novel I am compiling as .mobi
Looking at it in the Kindle Previewer and on my Kindle Fire, I see the book title in small font on each page, including the cover page, at the top center. It looks like it’s in the header, but I don’t see any header setting in Compile for .mobi
Hoping you can clue me in to what’s going on, I’ve checked the user manual and looked at the Compile settings and don’t see it!
Thanks, I’ve attached a screenshot.
That is set in the meta-data pane, Title field, but there is no control over the font and appearance of it, as that is being generated by the Kindle software and hardware, not the book itself (well, aside from what to put there).
Interesting that this shows up. This is the first time after publishing several novels using the Amazon KDP platform and Scrivener. I have always used the Metadata field for title in the past. I am using the same KindleGen as well. Now, having said that, we have no control over the way Amazon converts the file to their proprietary format for publication–that may have changed somehow. One thing I might try: rather than uploading a .mobi I could upload an epub file – Amazon will accept either. Or, I suppose I could try just leaving out the title from the Metada field–though that’s a lesser desireable outcome. If anyone else has experience with this, please weigh in with your comments. Thank you.
None of that is likely to make a difference - this is just a feature of the Kindle Fire. You say that you have done things the same in the past, but have you recently updated to the latest Kindle Previewer? Because the difference there is that it now shows a Kindle Fire preview by default. The title isn’t at the top of the page for the regular Kindle preview. Presumably Amazon has just decided to insert a default header, much as Apple does with iBooks. A .mobi file just has some meta-data saying, “This is the title of the book”, and it has some HTML files containing the text; it is then entirely up to the individual Kindle device how to lay all of this out, and whether to add headers or footers and suchlike (which are not part of the .mobi format, but the Kindle device may decide to take some meta-data and use that if Amazon wants it to).
In short, it’s not something you should really worry about, as this is presumably how Amazon intends books to look on the Kindle Fire. I don’t have a Kindle Fire to test out any of my purchased books, though, so I can only go by what the previewer does (no Kindle Fires in the UK yet).
All the best,
Keith
Yeah, this is just how books look on the Fire. I’ve got one, and I’ve been reading on it for several months now, and in my opinion as a reader this isn’t something to worry about. It’s actually a nice feature because you know where you can always look to see what you’ve got loaded up when you turn the device on. It’s consistent and informative, and if you could control it, it would lose that function. It’s also, I should add, totally transparent, just as the page numbers and book title are in a paper book. After 30 seconds, you don’t even see them.
