Amazon has made available a beta version of a new program,
Kindle Create, for publishing Kindle books sourced from Word or PDF documents. There is a good write up at
The Digital Reader.
It seems that the intent of this program is to simplify the publishing process for novice authors. Instead of uploading a Word file and then having to download the result of conversion for testing, Kindle Create does conversion, previewing, and simple fix-ups all in one app. I did some playing around with it and here are my first impressions.
On the positive side it does seem simple to use and so could help someone who is trying to publish a book without having to learn a lot.
Now for the negatives.
The program imports from a Word document, but does not export. Any edits and formatting changes made after import are only available in the proprietary format used by this program. That could be a problem if you want to publish the same book as an EPUB. (Amazon probably considers this to be a positive.) Likewise, if you want to revise the original Word document and republish you will need to redo all edits made with Kindle Create.
It doesn't work with every Word document. If the import fails it pops up a dialog box telling you to submit your Word file directly via KDP instead. It doesn't provide any information at all on why the conversion failed.
Looking behind the scenes at how the program works may provide some information on the direction Amazon is going with the Kindle platform. Internally the program uses KPF file format, which is KFX data stored in a SQL database. The Word file is converted to KFX on import. Much of the conversion and previewing code seems to be borrowed from Kindle Previewer 3. Changes are made using a new KFX editor with limited functionality. Since the file sent to Amazon when the book is published is basically KFX, Amazon must be deriving the MOBI and KF8 formats from KFX at their end. This is the reverse of how things have worked up to now.