Quote:
Originally Posted by Sella174
I do know that making a working ePub is super-easy; but as I am not interested in the ePub, I just felt that it was an unnecessary step towards the desired end-product. Alas, ePub first, then mobi.
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Several years ago I was asked to make Kindle books, had no idea how they worked so did some research, ignored epub as that seemed irrelevant.
I coded up a HTML file including styles, checked that in Firefox, then made the necessary OPF and an NCX (table of contents links), then loaded them into the command line kindlegen: e.g.
p:\kindlegen\kindlegen thiefk.opf -c2 -o ThiefOfLove.mobi -verbose
Then preview it, check, revise, recompile.
It worked, but now I know it is ten times easier going via epub. Sigil and calibre can handle making the TOC, for instance, where before I used Excel to make the ncx file.
There are quick and dirty methods to make mobi: many self-publishers just submit a Word file to Amazon and it is converted to Kindle. Results vary from tolerable to awful. See Amazon's Kindle forums.
The reason everyone here suggests going epub-> mobi is that there is no editor and very few tools for mobi. Amazon is more concerned with DRM than making it easy to create ebooks.
Any programs that give you mobi editing functionality first convert the mobi to epub, whether they show you that or not. This can give you a pretty ugly and hard to work with file.
The best practice is to make a correct epub, where you have many tools for checking and modifying them, and can get advice here. Then export to mobi (in calibre, built in, in Sigil, use the kindlegen plugin ; or use the Amazon Kindle previewer, which converts as well as previews) and 99% of the time, you're done. Epub2 can be converted to epub3 if necessary (e.g., for Apple's iBooks) with a plugin and one click. You can choose which Kindle format to make: KF7 (original mobi, for very old Kindles), KF8 (AZW3 mobi), or the combined mobi with both.