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Originally Posted by Notjohn
The only year I can reliably remember is 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia.
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Gosh, and I think that
I feel old....
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There has, more recently (more recently than 1648 and also the year you're referring to), been a contretemps over the SRL with respect to Kindle Unlimited books. I suppose Amazon was upset that some people might be earning 0.004 cents for making readers start with the TOC. That seems to have died down, presumably because Amazon figured out a way to set the SRL to its satisfaction. (When we say "Amazon sets it...." surely we mean that Amazon relies on software to set it? There must be thousands of new e-books every day!)
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As a not-publisher, in terms of frame of reference, the contretemps over this--the kerfuffle, if you will--is unclear to me. I am familiar with the issue over putting links from the front to the back, to drive payment for unread pages. (n.b.: I confess that it's not clear to me, either, if this REALLY happened, or if there was some flurry of people abruptly putting worthless links from the front to the end of the book, or if it was apocrypha. I do know that I was required to alter a well-known client's book, because s/he did have a link from front to rear, although not a "junk" link.) However, there are things that are self-fulfilling prophecies, or imaginary issues, or "everybody knows apocrypha..." etc. crapola. It's truly hard to discern the "real" from the crap, particularly at the KDP fora.
Yes, of course, it's a bot/program. I nearly laughed envisioning an army of people, sitting there with Kindles, clicking the Go To and then changing the files. If you think of them as Disney characters out of Fantasia, it's a real hoot.
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As for "first full page of text," that has not been my experience. More often, the purchased book opens in the middle of the TOC. (Not the beginning. The middle, even if it's a short one.)
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Yes, I would agree with that, particularly for a) uploaded ePUBs and b) uploaded MOBIs (Kindlebooks) created
from ePUBs. Of course, there are uploaded MOBIs created from about a zillion other sources.
With SRLs set in the guide PRIOR to the TOC, that is. (from Word, Jutoh, Scrivener, yadda yadda...) so we cannot speak to every possible input. Oh, and Calibre, too.
Hitch