MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

jhowell · 05-11-2020, 02:43 PM

The "Look Inside" feature has some quirks. It uses its own SITB format which is akin to the KCR format used by the Kindle Cloud Reader. Both SITB and KCR allow for the rendering of Kindle books within a web browser.

SITB format has MOBI7 and MOBI8 variants, corresponding to old-style MOBI and more full-featured KF8. But MOBI8 SITB implements only a subset of KF8. Since your book uses a feature that MOBI8 SITB does not handle, Look Inside instead uses MOBI7 SITB format as a fallback.** So what you are seeing is how the book will render in MOBI7 format, which is also how it will look on the oldest Kindle models and in the Kindle Cloud Reader.

MOBI7 does not support SVG and embedded fonts so those features are missing in your Look Inside view. You can improve on this by using media queries to enable simplified fallback formatting on MOBI7 devices.

It is a bit of a catch 22 situation in that Amazon expects you to build your book so that it renders well on the whole family of Kindle apps and devices, but the Kindle Previewer only shows how it appears on the newest ones.

(** = I do not know the actual reason why this book did not allow MOBI8 SITB. Instead of an unsupported feature the failure might have been induced by the trimming process that produces the sample-sized book.)

05-11-2020, 02:43 PM	#2
jhowell Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,107 Karma: 92190133 Join Date: Nov 2011 Location: Charlottesville, VA Device: Kindles	The "Look Inside" feature has some quirks. It uses its own SITB format which is akin to the KCR format used by the Kindle Cloud Reader. Both SITB and KCR allow for the rendering of Kindle books within a web browser. SITB format has MOBI7 and MOBI8 variants, corresponding to old-style MOBI and more full-featured KF8. But MOBI8 SITB implements only a subset of KF8. Since your book uses a feature that MOBI8 SITB does not handle, Look Inside instead uses MOBI7 SITB format as a fallback. So what you are seeing is how the book will render in MOBI7 format, which is also how it will look on the oldest Kindle models and in the Kindle Cloud Reader. MOBI7 does not support SVG and embedded fonts so those features are missing in your Look Inside view. You can improve on this by using media queries to enable simplified fallback formatting on MOBI7 devices. It is a bit of a catch 22 situation in that Amazon expects you to build your book so that it renders well on the whole family of Kindle apps and devices, but the Kindle Previewer only shows how it appears on the newest ones. ( = I do not know the actual reason why this book did not allow MOBI8 SITB. Instead of an unsupported feature the failure might have been induced by the trimming process that produces the sample-sized book.) Last edited by jhowell; 05-12-2020 at 09:42 AM.