I was hoping that Scrivener 3 would improve how ebooks appear in Amazon’s Look Inside feature, but no. Compiling in ePub 3 is no good as it produces a litany of symbols in Kindle Previewer. Compiling as KW8 Mobi produces a total mess – much worse than ePub 2. The file looks perfect in Kindle Previewer.
What could I be doing wrong?
The reason this was a mess in Scrivener 2 was that Scrivener used multiple CSS files - a different CSS file for each HTML file, and Amazon’s Look Inside feature only grabs the first CSS file to use with the Look Inside feature, regardless of whether or no that is the correct CSS file for the text. Scrivener 3 only outputs a single CSS file, meaning that this should no longer be the case. Given that Scrivener 3 outputs solid ePub syntax, it is very difficult to say what is going on without more information. I don’t know what you mean about a litany of symbols in Kindle Previewer, either - could you please provide a little more information?
If I compile as ePub 3 (using an amended version of the supplied Ebook preset), when I upload it to Amazon symbols appear in the online previewer everywhere there’s a punctuation mark like a comma or a full stop or anything else. I don’t even know the names of these symbols. They’re not ordinary keyboard selections. There is another thread on here where they mention this happening, but no solution.
So I switched to KF8 Mobi. This file looks fine in Amazon’s previewer. But in Look Inside there are numbers in front of the table of contents items, the initial block quote and attribution styles (for the epigraphs) do nothing, and even the chapter headings aren’t centred.
This does sound like serious problems in Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. Tables of contents in Epub 3 (and KF8 files based on Epub 3) are in fact lists, but their numbers shouldn’t be shown by a good ebook reader.
Could you please tell me how you preview “Look Inside” with your books? I haven’t found an easy way of testing this because as far as I can see, you have to upload a book you intend to publish, so I’m not sure I can do this with sample books used purely for troubleshooting.