Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
amazon's email intake is horrible. I have seen reports of them rejecting all sorts of epubs that display fine elsewhere. They are going to inconvenience a lot of people with this change.
Personally I suggest you stop relying on the email delivery service. It's too unreliable, for instance, the other day I had a report of it rejecting an epub simply because it had undecodable fonts in it. Fonts are entirely optional, they can be ignored if needed.
A publishing manuscript intake tool is not appropriate for processing general consumer epubs. Par for the course for amazon, though.
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Unfortunately, I like the email service not only because it's automatic (and I "subscribe" to a lot of items) but also it puts the periodical in the cloud so it's available to all of my several devices (Kindle eReaders and apps). Otherwise I'd have to sideload things onto the eReaders and go through who knows how many hoops to get things onto to the apps on my android phone and iPad.
So I'm stuck with imperfection.
But as to the unknown errors in that New York Times epub, it must have been something on the website that day causing the epub anomaly because
downloading the paper as an epub and emailing it through calibre has worked fine every day since then. (And it worked fine as a mobi that day).
And all the other recipes have worked fine (I do NYT and the two versions of the Financial Times every morning) London Review of Books download as epub and was auto-emailed successfully today also. Today's issue of New York Magazine was also initially rejected by Amazon, but I later attached it to an email (without redownloading it) and it went through fine on the second try. So, yes, a bit unreliable. Hopefully they'll get the bugs worked out.
But it's a pain to email anything outside of calibre. For some reason Amazon sends you an email asking you "verify your request". Maybe that's because I use a third party email client (several), and I use my regular "FastMail" account address as an "identity" or "alias", but everything is sent through my GMail account on Google's servers. So maybe the request gets flagged for too many email addresses in the hidden "details", making it look suspicious. In calibre I just use my FastMail address and the FastMail SMTP servers.
I've only recently switched to the EPUB format for news because
Amazon will stop allowing any new MOBI uploads in August. So it'll be epub or nothing from that point on.
I like the epub news on the Kindle eReaders because it takes advantage of the Kindle's font formatting (various stages of "bold"). The mobi's do not.
What I don't like about the epubs is that, unlike the mobi's,
you can't swipe up and down on the page to go the "next" or "previous" article in the publication. Have to keep bouncing back and forth through the TOC or section menus to get to the next article. Especially a nuisance if you only want to skim the first few paragraphs or sentcnces of an article then move on.