Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
I suspect it was because I'd used some section headings with a distinctive css style but not tagged them as a header style.
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Definitely should have marked them as proper headings in the first place.
And then using page-break-before on lots of strangely formatted <p>s? Could probably see why an automated check might complain about that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Are Amazon tightening up their standards retrospectively?
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Seems like it.
In a single swoop, ~30 of my conversions got hit with KQNs. And the craziest is the TOC being multiple levels deep:
Quote:
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Few items in your Logical Table of Contents (NCX) is not visible in certain kindle devices such as tablets, E-ink devices and IOS platforms. This issue is seen because those items are set in Level 2. Please change the label entities from level 2 to level 1, so that all the NCX label entities are visible to customers.
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Code:
- Part 1
-- Chapter 1
--- Subchapter 1.1 <---- KQN Issue!!!!
Our most illustrious user, Hitch, told me it's most likely because "Kindle for PC can't display <h3> or deeper"...
Getting a KQN hit over that is absolutely absurd, especially with Non-Fiction works. <h3> is EXTREMELY common (and while <h4> and <h5> are much more rare, they're still possible).
Mangling the levels up the chain would completely defeat the purpose of a properly nested TOC!
(And how much do you want to bet... five years from now, you'll get hit with KQNs for having a wrongly nested TOC after you "corrected it".)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I mean...I can't fathom what's going to happen as this pervades the self-pubbing universe of existing ebooks.
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Absolutely no idea, especially if they are going through books pre-high-DPI and insisting on higher resolution images.
As you've said, in many cases there aren't higher quality sources.
What are they going to do next, crack down on lower resolution covers for old books... when their old standards insisted on resolutions like 600x900?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
YES. I have a book in right now--DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!--that has been KQN'ed for, wait for it, ONE, repeat, ONE expired link.
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While it's a good idea to try to correct this sort of thing if/when you can, it's insane to strictly enforce it.
Link Rot is natural, and a large percent of all URLs die each year.
Back in 2017,
I linked to the fantastic article "When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks" discussing that...
* * *
Tip: Calibre Editor's
Tools > External Links > Check External Links is absolutely fantastic for quickly checking for dead links.
Before publishing an ebook, I always try to preemptively squash all dead links. (And since many books I work on a pre-publication... we can take care of it in Print as well.)
But once it's out in the wild... the amount of working URLs can only go down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I mean, here's a question--will they ask print publishers to go back and redo the book, because their links are expired?????????
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Similarly,
I linked to the fantastic talk from ebookcraft 2019 "Building Ebooks that Last" (actually given by the same woman who wrote the above article!).
She used to work as an editor for Houghton Mifflin, and she explained they do get QC reports from across all retailers. At 7:30 + 12:00, she shows pie charts of flagged reports:
- 69% typos
- 12.8% navigation
- 6.7% punctuation
- [...]
but if you remove the 2 huge typo categories, then this is all the non-typo errors reported:
- 52.9% navigation
- (At 13:00: she says "sometimes these are an error in a TOC file or a cross-reference... but the vast vast vast majority of these are Link Rot")
- 16.7% metadata
- 14.9% formatting
- 4.6% image quality
- 4.0% missing content
- 2.3% redundancy
- [...]
... I doubt Amazon would force them to pull their books down though. (They would probably let the big guys slide, while self-pubbers get crushed under mass automated checks.)
And these big publishers have the capability to fix a lot of this stuff... self-publishers who ran through the disgusting Word->MOBI workflows? You think they'll be able to dig through the technical innards and fix some of these issues on a years-old ebook?