Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I doubt that MOBI7 will be going away any time soon. Publishers need to make the best of the current situation.
Besides the older Kindle devices that only support it, MOBI7 is also used as the basis for the primary format in Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader ( read.amazon.com) and as the fallback format in reflowable books produced using Amazon's Kindle Create publishing tool.
The discussion in this thread so far has been about tables. Previous threads on this topic have focused on the differences in how images are displayed between MOBI7 and KF8 and how to adapt books to have them display as nicely as possible in both formats. That is often a bigger concern for publishers.
I agree that tables should be avoided in e-books when possible. Section 10.5 of the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines has some suggestions on creating tables, such as keeping them small and simple. The KFX renderer in newer Kindle apps and devices has a pop-up table viewer that helps a bit.
Many will suggest replacing tables with images, but that has some downsides. For example the text will not be in the reader's chosen font. Also text search and dictionary lookups will not function. |
I'm not saying to drop Mobi. I'm saying to allow KF8 only eBooks where they use advanced formatting that Mobi won't work well enough with.
Yes, some tables should be avoided. But the problem is that if you were to make this eBook in Mobi properly, it would need table images. which to some might be unreadable.
What I don't get is why Amazon created KF8 with advanced features if they were keeping Mobi that doesn't have any advanced features. The problem is that you can do things in KF8 that don't work in Mobi. Amazon should allow eBooks to move on as needed. They already allow things like Kindle-in-Motion to not work on old Kindles.