Can I upload both fixed and reflowable editions of same book?

[JeffOYB]

Can I upload both fixed and reflowable editions of same book to Amazon for their Kindle program?

I could add the relevant phrase to each title.

I already uploaded a fixed-layout edition and I note that Amazon added this descriptor to my title line: "[Print Replica]"

Maybe if I upload a reflowable edition they'll add a tag that makes it clear.

Laptop and tablet users might prefer the fixed -- since i have a nice layout w a lot of photos and captions.

Phone users might prefer the reflowable.

I should be able to make all customers happy! ...I'm certainly going to sell both editions on my own website.

Thanks!

[Notjohn]

I think you ought to ask KDP Support about this.

Amazon certainly permits multiple language versions of an ebook, and I suppose you could argue that this is basically the same idea.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

Can I upload both fixed and reflowable editions of same book to Amazon for their Kindle program?

I could add the relevant phrase to each title.

I already uploaded a fixed-layout edition and I note that Amazon added this descriptor to my title line: "[Print Replica]"

Maybe if I upload a reflowable edition they'll add a tag that makes it clear.

Laptop and tablet users might prefer the fixed -- since i have a nice layout w a lot of photos and captions.

Phone users might prefer the reflowable.

I should be able to make all customers happy! ...I'm certainly going to sell both editions on my own website.

Thanks!

Well, Amazon might allow it, of course, but be aware that both "editions" will NOT be sold on the same sales page--so you could equally lose customers, who decide that if they land on the FXL version, that they expressly do NOT want FXL, as FXL is a giant PITA to read.

They will NOT add a tag telling people that it's a reflowable eBook.

(With regard to selling from your own website, you might want to read this article on my website--you can bypass the entire discussion of DRM, and skip right to the last section: http://www.booknook.biz/platforms-re...my-own-website . EVERY, repeat, EVERY client that we've had that started doing that--doctor's offices, law offices, corporations, etc.--all gave it up inside of 6 months, for the reasons I mentioned in that last paragraph.)

Just saying!

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, Amazon might allow it, of course, but be aware that both "editions" will NOT be sold on the same sales page--so you could equally lose customers, who decide that if they land on the FXL version, that they expressly do NOT want FXL, as FXL is a giant PITA to read.

They will NOT add a tag telling people that it's a reflowable eBook.

(With regard to selling from your own website, you might want to read this article on my website--you can bypass the entire discussion of DRM, and skip right to the last section: http://www.booknook.biz/platforms-re...my-own-website . EVERY, repeat, EVERY client that we've had that started doing that--doctor's offices, law offices, corporations, etc.--all gave it up inside of 6 months, for the reasons I mentioned in that last paragraph.)

Just saying!

Hitch

So Amazon adds a tag when you used Fixed Layout but not for Reflowable?

If they add a tag for one but not the other I can make my title deal w that: "TITLE -- Reflowable Edition."

About selling on your own site...I'm confused. Everyone sells their stuff on their own site and on every other site they can, right? Obviously I wouldn't limit my selling to my site but I have all my books for sale on my site and ... everywhere else I can. Works. No reason to say no to any sales. Ppl buy from all sorts of places. Listings aren't exclusive. (Unless you sign away rights.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

So Amazon adds a tag when you used Fixed Layout but not for Reflowable?

Well...think of it this way: do you see the "reflowable" tag, all over Amazon, as that's how 99.99% of all eBooks are? No, it's the default, so it's assumed.

If they add a tag for one but not the other I can make my title deal w that: "TITLE -- Reflowable Edition."

Sure, you can try it. {shrug}. BTW, I find that the average person has absolutely ZERO idea what "reflowable" means. FWIW.

About selling on your own site...I'm confused. Everyone sells their stuff on their own site and on every other site they can, right? Obviously I wouldn't limit my selling to my site but I have all my books for sale on my site and ... everywhere else I can. Works. No reason to say no to any sales. Ppl buy from all sorts of places. Listings aren't exclusive. (Unless you sign away rights.)

Did you read the last section that I mentioned, in the linked article? Or did you not bother to read it? I'm pretty sure that if you had, you wouldn't be confused about what I was saying. (BTW, no...not "everybody" sells their own stuff on their own websites and every other website in the known universe. In terms of authors, 99.99% of them simply have LINKS to their own books on retail sites; they do not sell the books from their own websites. Most have zero desire to handle fulfilment.)

If your demographic is very tecchie, and you don't give two hoots about DRM, great. Knock yourself out.

If your demographic is not tecchie, (and you might be surprised) unless you're prepared to provide unpaid tech support, I think you'll find that selling from your own site is a whole other kettle of fish. (Why on earth does everyone think that's soooo easy? Sure, sell a PDF. Any moron can download a PDF. However, 99% of all eBook buyers get those files automagically delivered to their devices. Amazon magically delivers the mobis to their Kindles; B&N does the same for Nook, etc. They, the buyer, don't "download" them. They don't "sideload" them. They don't have to know how to find their own download folders or know how to download from a browser. You think everyone knows how to do that? You're in for a shock.)

The single biggest shock, to me, in my own business was finding out just how incredibly tech-illiterate people are. (My business formats print and eBooks for publishers.) I always knew that paying my bookmakers would be the single largest expense, in my line of work--what I did not anticipate is that unpaid tech support would be the second-largest, and I mean large when I say that. About 30K per year, in unpaid tech support, is what it costs me in real money. If you had asked me, before I started this biz in '09-10, "can the average person download from a browser," I'd have said yes. Or that the average person could figure out how to side-load to a device. Or understood that to open a specific computer file, they had to have a matching program.

Trust me, the normal person actually knows NONE OF THOSE THINGS.

What I said, in the article to which I'd linked you, was that of all the clients (out of 4,000+) of ours that decided that they were going to sell ebooks from their own website, (law firms, doctor's offices, other businesses amongst them), not one, NOT ONE, continued to do so after a few months. All of them, every single one, gave it up because of the brain-damage and personnel costs of tech support. People calling to complain that they couldn't get the ebooks on their devices, people calling because they couldn't find the downloads, people calling because, because, because. The ones that didn't have a phone number got email after email complaining about the same things.

Look, it's certainly no skin off my nose. I don't care, one way or the other, if you sell your book from your own website. It's your book and your time. I was simply trying to alert you to something that the average, reasonably-tecchie person never thinks about--just how technologically illiterate the normal person IS. This is something that I deal with every single day. If you've got an assistant or a support person that can handle all this for you, that's great, but I waste spend at least an hour a day, every single day, and sometimes quite a bit more, doing nothing but walking people through very, very fundamental things like downloading, saving files, etc. (Oh, yeah--another fave--finding out that people have NO IDEA what a file extension is or means, so they constantly corrupt their files when downloading by saving sans the extension.)

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

PS: Rats. My pics display great in EPUB and I'm ready to upload, but when I use Calibre to convert the file to AZW3 or MOBI the pics become too small on each page. (They still enlarge good when dblclked.) Rats. Why did the conversion in Calibre shrink my display pics? Rats!

Interestingly, the MOBI file is 12mb while the AZW3 is 27mb. Image rez seems the same.

Update: I emailed a test MOBI file to my old iPhone 5 and opened it in Kindle and the pics displayed fine! Good news! Then I emailed the MOBI file to my Samsung Galaxy and opened it in Kindle and -- rats -- the images are displaying tiny. Actually looking at files in real devices is the impt test. More so than Kindle Previewer, right? Well, it's too bad that it's displaying so differently in the 2 devices. Ideas?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

PS: Rats. My pics display great in EPUB and I'm ready to upload, but when I use Calibre to convert the file to AZW3 or MOBI the pics become too small on each page. (They still enlarge good when dblclked.) Rats. Why did the conversion in Calibre shrink my display pics? Rats!

Interestingly, the MOBI file is 12mb while the AZW3 is 27mb. Image rez seems the same.

Because, how ePUB formats images and how MOBI does are two very, very different things, and any commercial firm formats images TWICE, not just once. We format images for both KF8 and KF7 devices using media-queries--the same media-queries that you cannot put inside an ePUB, not if it's going to pass ePUBcheck.

This is why most formatting firms do NOT use "one file to rule them all."

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

Any way to get Calibre to convert EPUB to something Kindle can use in a way that doesn't shrink the display size of the images?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

Any way to get Calibre to convert EPUB to something Kindle can use in a way that doesn't shrink the display size of the images?

Hi:

This would be easier if there were one thread for your issues, and we stuck to it.

It's not Calibre. It's the inherent differences between ePUB and MOBI. You're asking Calibre to make up for the lack of mobi-centric coding in your ePUB. The two formats are NOT the same, despite their similarities, and how they handle images is significantly different. Not to mention the millions of KF7 devices out there, that handle images in yet another different way.

Calibre is a very nice tool for DIY, for-yourself/your own personal library-only conversion. It is NOT a formatting tool. Kovid himself would tell you that, if you ask him, and you are asking it to do things for which it is not suited and not capable.

It's like your assertion that "anchors worked!" Anchors don't work, as it happens, outside of the iOS environment, and they most certainly don't work in MOBI. There are thousands of factors that go into making a commercial-quality eBook. Knowing what works in one environment, versus the other, and knowing how to do those things, is just part of it.

I'm not trying to snark you here, but just running a file through the sausage-making machine isn't going to fix those things. Calibre's software is, in many ways, a substitute for knowledge--knowing how to code HTML, the differences between ePUB and MOBI, etc.--but it can only compensate for that lack of knowledge up to a point. Like ALL software, with Calibre, it's GIGO.

There's no magic button, in Calibre, as far as I know, that's going to write media-queries for you to solve your image problem. As I don't use it, I suppose it's possible that someone who does will jump in here and say, "oh, yeah, you can do X," but I doubt it. The coding that addresses image-display issues, in MOBI, will make an ePUB commercially unusable, as it would cause that ePUB to fail ePUBcheck, which I believe I mentioned about 5-6 posts ago. I would be quite, quite surprised to see Calibre have some automagic function that writes media queries FOR you.

Sorry, but...that's pretty much how it is.

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

i'm checking my files in iOS, Samsung Android and Mac laptop -- so far the EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 files all are respecting the anchors I put in with Indesign. Photo placement is awesome, no complaint.

I see that Epubcheck is a command line software. I can use that kind of thing but it's pretty much beyond me. Thankfully I haven't had to yet. KDP didn't mention it that I recall. I've sold hundreds of copies of my ebooks and haven't had a complaint yet even though I don't recall using it.

I just ran a sample chapter with a dozen photos thru https://www.ebookit.com/tools/bp/Bo/...epub-validator and it said no errors. it gave me warnings about fonts and a warning about "CSS selector specifies absolute position" in one location that was listed as the last page of the book, well past that chapter.

Hmmm, I just used https://www.epubconverter.com to convert my EPUB to MOBI and then looked at the resulting file on both iphone and Samsung and the display photos are great on both! ...also the anchored placement.

I think that given my skill level i'm going to have to just try various tools out there and then test the results on all my available devices and testing services then when I get something that seems good all around, I'll upload to Kindle and if that goes well we'll see what happens.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

i'm checking my files in iOS, Samsung Android and Mac laptop -- so far the EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 files all are respecting the anchors I put in with Indesign. Photo placement is awesome, no complaint.

I see that Epubcheck is a command line software. I can use that kind of thing but it's pretty much beyond me. Thankfully I haven't had to yet. KDP didn't mention it that I recall. I've sold hundreds of copies of my ebooks and haven't had a complaint yet even though I don't recall using it.

I just ran a sample chapter with a dozen photos thru https://www.ebookit.com/tools/bp/Bo/...epub-validator and it said no errors. it gave me warnings about fonts and a warning about "CSS selector specifies absolute position" in one location that was listed as the last page of the book, well past that chapter.

Hmmm, I just used https://www.epubconverter.com to convert my EPUB to MOBI and then looked at the resulting file on both iphone and Samsung and the display photos are great on both! ...also the anchored placement.

I think that given my skill level i'm going to have to just try various tools out there and then test the results on all my available devices and testing services then when I get something that seems good all around, I'll upload to Kindle and if that goes well we'll see what happens.

With all due respect, NONE of those display KF7, and nor does KP3.

But I see little reason to continue trying to push this chain uphill. I mean, you're sure that anchors work, having not tested your files on a single actual Kindle device, and given that my company's only made 4,000+ eBooks--what would I know?

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

Of course what I need is access to usual testing and formatting/converting tools. KDP leads publishers thru the process and I follow it. If I'm doing something that is bad I need tests to show. All I know at this point is that sometimes it all looks great. I also now see that I can download something called KindleGen -- I'll see what that does or tells me.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

Of course what I need is access to usual testing and formatting/converting tools. KDP leads publishers thru the process and I follow it. If I'm doing something that is bad I need tests to show. All I know at this point is that sometimes it all looks great. I also now see that I can download something called KindleGen -- I'll see what that does or tells me.

Okay: the KDP doesn't test all your books, and the Previewer will not show you all the issues. It won't even be close. There are issues with the (still) millions of KF7 devices that Previewer cannot show, any longer, because no KF7 emulator is still on there. This is why professionals and authors that have published more than a single book have real devices.

They're not "leading you." They've provided FAQs, etc., to be of assistance, but it's NOT intended to be the total process. That's why they have the Publishing Guidelines, which are over 100 pages long.

I think it's important to distinguish here--Amazon does a lot to help the self-pubbing author, but they don't do everything, and nor do they consider it their job. The job of ensuring that a book looks and works perfectly is the publisher's job; they have issued some tools to help with that. But it's absolutely not their responsibility to warn a publisher about all the possible pitfalls, or that this formatting over here might not work right on that device over there. If your book looks great on Previewer, but looks terrible on real devices, they're not going to say that it's their fault, or say that it's okay, because you relied on their software; they're still going to make you remove it from sale and fix it.

I'm not lecturing you here; I'm trying to make sure that you understand that their various and sundry software tools and what-have-you are there to be helpful--but they're not remotely considered the end-all and be-all. Sure, they're trying to be helpful, and it's a lot easier today for self-pubs than it was 8 years ago, when you either knew how to make and upload a MOBI, or tough luck, but it's still entirely, 100%, the responsibility of the publisher to have the tools, the skills, and the devices (for testing) to ensure that his book looks great and works correctly. You'll note in the PG that they mention that using Previewer is a great way to "...test your Kindle books for the latest typographic and layout improvements that come with Enhanced Typesetting." It doesn't say, use this instead of real devices; on the very same page, they talk about using real devices to test books. Ask yourself--why on earth would they talk about that, when Previewer exists, if Previewer alone was adequate?

OK, so...I've talked enough here. Tried to clarify, but...y'know.

Hitch

[JeffOYB]

I now notice that when I change the export settings in Indesign that the image display size changes in KP3. Ah ha! The results vary from small to tiny but it's something! Now if I can just get the exported item to display in KP3 like it does in the other eReaders I'll be on to something!

[JeffOYB]

UPDATE: Found the solution! The 'export to epub' settings aren't the only settings that control export to epub!

if you have trouble w images in your export then be sure to look into the export to epub controls within OBJECT STYLES!

Lots more -- w several impt quirks to consider -- at this link:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1839950