Quote:
Originally Posted by Sella174
At a glance this makes sense, however ...
Which ePub version do I target? 2.0.1 or 3.0 or 3.0.1? Obviously no use doing an ePub version 2 when by the time there is a demand for ePub's, version 4 is standard and actually supported on many devices. Also no seamless upgrade path, as version 3 proved so wonderfully.
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Unless your books require the functionality of 3, you can still do 2.0. We're still doing 2.0, by and large, at my shop, to ensure that our clients can upload wherever they want, but we are looking quite seriously at moving to 3.0 shortly.
IME, for what it's worth, books uploaded in accordance with the then-current standard stay standard. In other words, we have clients that uploaded very old ePUB 2.0's, back 6+ years ago, and those are still working at Kobo, B&N, iBooks, etc. The issue tends to be uploading an older epUB WHEN ePUBcheck updates, more than anything else. Does that mean that someday, ePUBreaders won't support ePUB 2.0? Probably.
But that problem isn't entirely eliminated with MOBI, either. Not that long ago, you could still upload a .prc file, to the KDP. Effectively, a KF7 file. Now, you can't do that. You can upload a KF7-compliant single MOBI, yes, but it has to be a .mobi file, not a .prc.
We struggle against changing standards daily. I recommend that given the tech level of your authors--which is basically what we deal with--that you keep the books simple. No dropcaps, etc. Don't embed fonts. Make a VERY basic file, and let them run with that. After all, these are just for their own pleasure, right? Why make your life miserable? If you were making them for distro, that would be different.
Tell them: here's your MOBI, and someday, it may not work on your newer Kindle devices, but that's true of all eBook files. It's really not MUCH different, with MOBI, than it is with ePUB; the one main diff is, there's no official "MOBI check," other than the Amazon intake. (But using a bad ePUB, BTW, will, as of late, cause a rejection at KDP.)
Lastly: even our clients have been able to find the Kindle email addresses, and attach and email themselves a file, to their own Kindles. Try it--you might be surprised. Hell, try it with your own, just loading a zipped HTML file. You never know, you might get a viable file out of it that you could then send to the others.
Hitch