[starrigger]

I've just finished a frustrating bout of uploading a book to the iTunes store. While nothing about the process was easy, the most frustrating thing was the repeated rejection of my epub book file by the Apple system. I created the epub in Calibre, from a Word doc saved to filtered html. Normally this gives me excellent results. (But this is the first time I've tried to upload to the Apple store.)

What it mostly complained about was "link" and "vlink" coding in the header to the last (or nearly last) html file in the epub. This coding was there, I assume, because of links I have in the "about the author" section at the end of the book.

I never did succeed in getting the Calibre version uploaded. I finally tried the file produced by the Smashwords meatgrinder, and Apple accepted that without problem. (That was from the same Word doc, give or take a few lines of text, and it had the same hyperlinks as the doc I used to make the Calibre version.)

I also tried running the Calibre version through an epub validator, and it failed, with a long list of the same kind of violations. The SW version passed with flying colors.

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I finally got a file up there through other means. But I'm a little concerned about what went wrong in this Calibre conversion, and whether I might have undiscovered issues in my other books.