I’ve made huge progress in learning to compile a kindle edition of my book via scrivener and love its flexibility. Two things are still keeping the Kindle Edition from being publishable:
Some of my chapters are showing up duplicated in the Kindle html table of contents, though if I click on the duplicated chapter heading they take me to the same chapter. I have uploaded a screen capture illustrating how the table of contents who up. Under the e-book options I have ‘generate html table of content’ clicked and only that. I have the book contents broken down into separate chapter files with the name of the chapter being the name of the individual files. the content of each file then starts with the chapter name. this is consistent with each chapter and file but only some of the chapters are showing duplicates in the TOC.
How do I fix this?
I can not for the life of me figure out how to change the formatting of the content. It seems that the Kindle edition has its own formatting. For example - my content shows the chapter headings as bold, larger type font and different type font. But the kindle edition shows them as the same as the chapter content. Not bold, not larger. I’ve tried changing this with the formatting option in the compiler but with no effective change. I’ve read through the guided tutorial and watched the video on compiling but still missing something.
Issue (1) is weird - I’ve never seen that before and can’t think what would cause it offhand. Could you possibly e-mail me the project (zipped up) at kb-tech-support AT literatureandlatte DOT com so that I can take a look?
As for (2), the Kindle is a little odd in that it tends to ignore font size and base the size on the heading level instead. So in the formatting pane, be sure to apply a level heading to your titles using this button:
The lower the heading number, the larger the text will be.
thanks for the help. I’m sending it to you in the next few minutes. Not sure i can zip it though. It’s 2mb in size. if that’s too large I can send it via YouSendIt.
Thanks for sending the file. I can see the problem and it’s straightforward to fix, although to understand why it is happening you need to know a little about how Scrivener builds a table of contents for an e-book. Basically, during the compile process, each chunk of text is assigned its title, which will be used in the ToC. Then, the ToC is built up by looking at page or section breaks - everything that starts on a new page gets added to the ToC. Your project has two problems:
Lots of the individual documents have page breaks inside them - my guess is that you’ve imported them from another program, so they need a little tidying up. This is easy enough to do. Just enter page layout mode by clicking on “Wrap” in the toolbar, then go through each document one-by-one. You will see that some documents are split across pages, with blank pages. So what’s happening is that documents with page breaks inside are getting two entries in the ToC. (Rather than adding page breaks to Scrivener’s editor, you should generally add them via the Compile “Separators” pane. Which brings me to…)
You haven’t set up the text documents to be separated by section/page breaks, so many aren’t appearing in the ToC at all. Once you’ve got rid of all the empty space and page breaks within the documents during step (1), be sure to choose “Section break” as the “Text separator” under the “Separators” pane of Compile.
Once you’ve followed these two steps, you should be good.
From what I can see, you have the titles in the text. You might want to think of deleting the titles in the text itself, and instead only having them inserted by ticking “Title” in the Formatting tag, and formatting the title as “Heading” style, if that makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, let me know, and I’ll reply again when I haven’t been drinking wine.
Using Scrivener, I created epub and mobi versions of a book.
Then viewed them in Calibre.
The epub is perfect; every page break observed.
The mobi runs all sections together, despite my asking (via checks) for page breaks in Scriv.
Does the post-processing of KindleGen create this problem?
It might be better to preview the .mobi file in Kindle Previewer (free from the Amazon publisher site), as that shows you exactly how it will look on Kindle devices. To me, this sounds like it might just be a Calibre issue, as the section breaks are certainly preserved and not affected by the Kindlegen process - Kindlegen should result in perfect .mobi files. The section breaks divide the text into separate HTML files internally, which e-readers show as different sections on new pages - but ultimately it’s up to the e-reader how to display that. So take a look on Kindle Previewer (available at amazon.com/gp/feature.html?i … 1000234621 ) as that will give you the most accurate idea of how your Kindle book will look. Let me know how you get on!
As I’m working on the Kindle version of my document I’m checking it with the Kindle app for the Macbook computer. Is that the same as Kindle Previewer? Will it accomplish essentially the same thing?
One of the reasons I’m asking is when I went to the url you gave to download Previewer, the download button wasn’t highlighted so I couldn’t download it. Made me wonder if I’d already downloaded it but when I searched on my Mac for “Previewer” nothing came up. Left me a bit confused.
The Kindle app does seem to work well. Let’s me see my ‘books’ in the Kindle library, and gives me the basic functions for viewing them including viewing the cover, contents, etc.
BRAD
No, it’s not the same thing - Kindle Previewer emulates the physical Kindle, and all versions of the Kindle app, so you can see exactly how the file will work on all devices. To enable the download buttons, you need to tick the “I agree to terms of use” checkbox above them.
I just ran the mobi file on Kindle Previewer, and it looks good, with all page breaks honored. Actually, it looks not so great on a tiny Kindle screen, so I may redesign some opening pages. It also views the book in Kindle for Mac, and there the appearance is just what I wanted.
The Previewer is a great tool for doing a final proof of the book. I noticed some anomalies, like underlines swapped for italics, and a few places where I need to add URLs. Otherwise, we are good to go.
Next I will have to deal with the various “publishers” to see about going online. Know a handy reference that covers Kindle, iBooks, and Nook?
Something has happened and suddenly my Kindle for Mac won’t operate properly. Not sure if it has anything to do with the Kindle Previewer I downloaded this am or not.
I’ve been noticing that the version I was using wouldn’t let me download any books to it from Amazon, so this morning when I noticed it again, I figured I’d just trash it and download a copy from Amazon again.
BAD idea I guess 'cause now it’s not working even to open my own kindle book or one I’d previously downloaded from another online resource.
In searching around, it appears there may be a number of different versions available for download and I’m wondering if I now have a newer version that’s not compatible with my OS X 10.5.8. The version of Kindle for Mac I’m getting is 1.6.
I’m going to take a break and step away from it for a little bit. Wondering what version others are finding that are working on an older MacBook or any MacBook for that matter.
Brad
Beg to differ but somehow I’ve been downloading a 1.6 version that doesn’t work on my MacBook. Must be the newest upgrade and maybe it’s only for the new Lion OS.
Anyway, when I saw you message I went looking for 1.5.1, found it at kindle-mac.en.uptodown.com/mac, downloaded it and I’m back in business. So, thanks druid. Much appreciated. Will keep the other publishing urls handy as well.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a universal ebook format?
