For Indie E-Book Authors And Publishers

[Tony_A20]

Kindle operating systems have never fully supported cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When the 2014 publishing guidelines became available, they contained *a sizeable list of "supported" CSS properties. Over the last six months, May-October, 2014, *an e-book entitled "E-Book CSS Examples" was developed to exercise and test *the CSS formatting capability of the various Kindle operating systems. The "Kindle For PC" application was chosen as the most capable Kindle test environment, and *examples of typical e-book use of CSS formatting were built *using HTML5 and the published list of supported CSS properties. It was a challenge.

As examples were created, they were tested using an HTML editor; *then a browser; *then compiled into a MOBI file using kindlegen.exe; and finally, displayed in Kindle for PC and the Kindle previewer. It soon became apparent that the Kindle Previewer was inadequate as most Kindle device emulations had very little CSS support, and even the later Kindle Fire emulations did not fully support the CSS properties the Kindle Publishing Guidelines said were supported. Even kindlegen.exe issued a warning for relative positioning that the Guidelines indicated were fully supported. It was evident that both kindlegen.exe and the Kindle Previewer did not provide the CSS support stated in the Guidelines. *Nevertheless, *Kindle for PC managed to display successive examples as they were conceived and built. *

The examples pushed the Kindle support envelope as far as possible to achieve the desired formatting, and in many cases exceeded expectations through the use of inventive HTML and CSS coding. *Several helpful e-book formatting alternatives were discovered and implemented. Two examples demonstrating the use of columns *were found to be very dependent on viewport and font size because Kindle does not support the CSS3 columns property. Rumors were also heard that the use of embedded fonts was unreliable because of the upload process used by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). *Problems were already apparent with the downloaded Kindle Previewer, which failed to display examples that were correctly presented using Kindle for PC, and the Previewer also failed to produce an e-book emulation for the iPad. However all constructed examples did display satisfactorily using Kindle for PC.

It was intended to publish the finished E-Book CSS Examples as *a Kindle e-book, but when the final MOBI file was successfully uploaded to KDP, the online KDP Previewer indicated an almost total inability to display any except the most simple examples correctly, and as warned, failed completely to display the embedded fonts. *Subsequent enquiries suggested that not only were the previously observed problems with kindlegen.exe and the Kindle Preview caused by out-of-date or inadequate support of the Kindle Guidelines, but that the KDP upload process was flawed as well.

Consequently, it was decided that attempting to report *CSS support, on a publishing system unable to provide enough CSS capability to publish the report, was impossible.

Therefore *E-Book CSS Examples is offered as a free download available from: www.katiebooks.ca as a MOBI format e-book suitable for display using Kindle for PC.

As well, the HTML source and external CSS files are available as a zipped download using a link at the end of the e-book.

Readers are reminded that the e-book as well as the zipped downloads are individually and collectively copyright 2014 © by Katie Books Canada and Bruce Anthony and that All Rights are reserved.