Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
Well, I've now removed all semantics except Cover and TOC, and it still opens at the Preface in Kindle Previewer, which is odd. But at least the partial semantics menu is gone.
|
As others have pointed out, what you do in the building and previewing stages is of little moment, since it appears that the Start Reading Location is set in the actual publishing workflow, after you have surrendered control over the book.
Amazon seems to want the book to open with the first page of Chapter One (in part, I suppose, to cut their costs in paying for pages read through Kindle Unlimited), skipping all preliminaries including the preface and foreword if any. Setting a SRL (or "text" in the case of a Sigil-built epub) may only serve to confuse matters.
I recently had this experience: I uploaded a new book with no SRL declaration, and the purchased copy opened at one place (I forget now which place that was). However, I spotted some typos, fixed them, and uploaded a new version. When the modified version was "pushed" to my Kindle archives by the support guy, behold! --
the book opened at a different place.
I agree with you that a book should start with the cover, and I am pleased that this is the case with the Look Inside sample. I wish I could similarly get my published books to start there (I actually managed that, one time, but at the cost of having two covers!). But since I can't seem to manage that, at least not on a consistent basis, I no longer worry about it.