Official words WRT where the book should begin?

[davidnwelton]

It's pretty obvious that Amazon and company want to start the book off where the contents begin. I've never seen them say so, though. Do they support and explain that decision somewhere?

I've also tried perusing the ePub standards docs, but they're a bit on the opaque side.

Thanks,
Dave

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by davidnwelton

It's pretty obvious that Amazon and company want to start the book off where the contents begin. I've never seen them say so, though. Do they support and explain that decision somewhere?

Amazon only explicitely says in the Kindle Publishing Guidelines that it supports TOC and SRL (start reading location) guide items/landmarks navs:

3.5.1 Guide Item Guideline #1: Recommended Guide Items

The Kindle platform supports guide items for defining the cover, the table of contents (TOC), and the start reading location (”Go to Beginning”). Do not set the start reading location to a blank page.
Amazon does not recommend adding additional guide items to the OPF file, because they will be grayed out in the menu options and may cause customer confusion.
IMPORTANT: Guide items, especially the TOC guide item, do not replace the table of contents.

As for the SRL, it appears that the KDP tools occasionally ignore them. For more information, see this thread.

[davidnwelton]

@Doitsu - sure, I read that. Is there anything authoratitive, anywhere, that explains the 'first content' decision?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by davidnwelton

@Doitsu - sure, I read that. Is there anything authoratitive, anywhere, that explains the 'first content' decision?

None that I'm aware of. My guess is that this dates back to the first three Kindle generations that didn't support the display of NCX TOCs.

Those Kindles required an HTML TOC and had a special Go to Beginning menu item that allowed the user to quickly go to the beginning of a book.



(Current PW2 models still have a Go to menu, but it's somewhat redundant.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by davidnwelton

@Doitsu - sure, I read that. Is there anything authoratitive, anywhere, that explains the 'first content' decision?

David:

Hitch here, nice to see you. There's nothing "authoritative" that has been published publicly, but I can tell you that in myriad emails with my Tech Account Rep and ECR that they absolutely decided that the SRL (Start Reading Location) would be the first content page (chapter) and that it *must* be after the TOC. This has been the case since the January before last (January 2013) at least; they implemented the change sometime around Nov-Dec 2012. And, yes, I've had a number of moderately heated emails with them over this topic, but...

The intake system at KDP is designed, primarily, to work with WORD files, not ePUBs, and, humorously enough, not built-mobi's. I can prove this by the simple expedient of showing the varied results in taking HTML source, and uploading it as a) zipped HTML, b) ePUB or c) MOBI, all with precisely the same content--you'll get three different SRL's, three different sets of fonts, etc. I've seen books that (I'm sure you've seen this) move the SRL to the last page of the TOC; but the new stupid pet trick, which has emerged in the last month, is that the SRL moves AFTER THE COVER IS UPLOADED. And even more fun, it moves INTO the chapter, so that it's on the 2nd, 3rd page of Chapter 1.

And, yes, we've sent a ton of test tiles, demo files, etc., to Amazon. They haven't budged on this in 20+ months, so I don't see that happening any time soon. Those of us who are the fleas on the elephant's back aren't really their concern--the hundreds of thousands of "Word file" uploaders, and THEIR demands on customer support and tech support--that's their concern. I guess they figure that those of us making the books professionally are big enough kids to look after ourselves. ;-)

Hitch