Kindle preview starting at #start in all formats but Fire

[petercrowell]

This book I'm building is nearly ready to go. The one remaining flaw is that while it opens in all other formats as expected (at the point where I have assigned the #start), in the Kindle Fire format, it insists on displaying the cover on opening.

The cover is the first file called for by the html document, which may be why it's defaulting to that image on open, but I can't figure out why it's doing this.

Is this standard with the Fire?

Any clues to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

[KevinH]

Hi,

You must specify the content.opf guide to have a "text" entry with a proper link. Also it does not hurt to have the guide items sorted alphabetically by type.

[petercrowell]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your response.

Here is what the guide section of my .opf file looks like:

<guide>
<reference type="toc" title="Table of Conents" href="5keys.html#TOC"></reference>
<reference type="start" title="Startup Page" href="5keys.html#start"></reference>
</guide>

Does that look right?

Thanks again!

[KevinH]

Hi,

No, it must be of type "text" not "start". Start is an older unsupported guide item (it is not part of the latest opf spec) only text is.

Check out the current opf spec here:

http://idpf.org/epub/20/spec/OPF_2.0...htm#Section2.6

So it should look like the following:
<guide>
<reference type="text" title="Startup Page" href="5keys.html#start"></reference>
<reference type="toc" title="Table of Conents" href="5keys.html#TOC"></reference>
</guide>


Notice "text" comes alphabetically before "toc"

And I would not start file names with numeric chars just as a general rule since it may violate some file naming conventions.

KevinH

Originally Posted by petercrowell

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your response.

Here is what the guide section of my .opf file looks like:

<guide>
<reference type="toc" title="Table of Conents" href="5keys.html#TOC"></reference>
<reference type="start" title="Startup Page" href="5keys.html#start"></reference>
</guide>

Does that look right?

Thanks again!

[wallcraft]

So far as I can tell, the actual Kindle Fire always opens new ebooks on the cover. So the previewer is showing you what happens on the Fire.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

So far as I can tell, the actual Kindle Fire always opens new ebooks on the cover. So the previewer is showing you what happens on the Fire.

No,

That is not true when properly done. I have several kindlegen generated ebooks that do not open to the cover when the guide type text is properly specified as above using the Kindle Previewer.

[petercrowell]

Well that seems to have done the trick, KevinH!

Thanks so much! I'm nearly ready to publish.