[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by mibtp

Hi, my ebook, when opened, starts 5 pages in; skips the cover, title page, TOC, etc.

I wrote Amazon about this as it involved using their viewer. This is how they responded:
===============
Hello from Amazon Kindle Publishing.

Thanks for writing to us.

The content would open at the start reading location / "go to beginning " set in the source.
===============

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks.
PatriceWilliamsMarks.com

Hi Patrice;

It's not a difficult task to set the "start reading" location; maybe the difficult thing is to explain it I'll try to do my best:

1. The first thing you need to do is to open the .html file where you want to set the "start reading" location. Open that file with a text processor like Notepad or Wordpad or something similar (I use Notepad++ but Notepad or Wordpad also will be usefull). We'll suppose that this .html is named "Mybook.html"

2. Once you opened "Mybook.html", find the word what you want to be the start of the reading. Suppose that you have something like this:

...
...

<h2>The Frog-King, or Iron Henry</h2>

  <p>In old times when wish*ing still helped one, the*re lived a king whose daugh*ters were all beau*ti*ful, but the youngest was so beau*ti*ful that the sun it*self, which has seen so much, was as*ton*ished when*ev*er it shone in her face.
...
...
</p>

You want the sentence "The Frog-King..." to be the start. Then, you need to add an "id" tag to that. Of the following way:

<h2 id="start">The Frog-King, or Iron Henry</h2>

On the other hand, if you don't have a tag like <h2> (or <p>, where to add id="start", you also can do the following:

<h2><a id="start"></a>The Frog-King, or Iron Henry</h2>

Both method will work.

Save the file "MyBook.html" with the changes.

After that you need to open the "content.opf" file associated with "MyBook.html"; also, open that file with a text proccesor. At the end of that file, you'll see a section named "Guide"; you will find something like:

<guide>

After that, add the following entry:

<reference href="MyBook.html#start" title="Beginning" type="text"/>

Of course, in place of "MyBook.html#start" you'll write here the real name of your .html file.

Save the changes. Now you'll be able to compile the .mobi book with Kindlegen and the book will start where you' wanted

Regards
Rubén