Amazon broke my Kindles!

[lkws1]

One month and one week ago I bought two Kindles for the purpose of using the WhisperSync function to sync my progress through Personal Documents across my phone and devices. With Amazon now disallowing MOBI uploads and having a woefully bad EPUB processor, it means the WhisperSync function is unfortunately useless to me.

Too bad both Kindles are one week out of their return window, so now I'm stuck with them!

Just venting here - I know most people sideload using USB but the syncing function was the main reason I went Kindle over Kobo.

[Sirtel]

What do you mean by "woefully bad epub processor"?

[lkws1]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

What do you mean by "woefully bad epub processor"?

When you send an ePUB file more often than not Amazon won't be able to put it on the Kindle because it needs to convert it into KFX (I think that's what's happening in the background), but it fails for a lot of different reasons (which it never tells you). So bottom line for any ePUB I send about 70% of the time Amazon can't put it on my Kindle. The 30% of time that it works, there are still formatting errors and it's overall a worse experience.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by lkws1

One month and one week ago I bought two Kindles for the purpose of using the WhisperSync function to sync my progress through Personal Documents across my phone and devices. With Amazon now disallowing MOBI uploads and having a woefully bad EPUB processor, it means the WhisperSync function is unfortunately useless to me.

Too bad both Kindles are one week out of their return window, so now I'm stuck with them!

Just venting here - I know most people sideload using USB but the syncing function was the main reason I went Kindle over Kobo.

I know it’s a pain but use the location number displayed at the bottom of your book to manually sync as you move from device to device. It’s very accurate.

[lkws1]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I know it’s a pain but use the location number displayed at the bottom of your book to manually sync as you move from device to device. It’s very accurate.

I think you're right about that, it's just a minor inconvenience and can be worked around with a little effort. However there is something about a good system being made worse that is hard to bear

[shalym]

Originally Posted by lkws1

When you send an ePUB file more often than not Amazon won't be able to put it on the Kindle because it needs to convert it into KFX (I think that's what's happening in the background), but it fails for a lot of different reasons (which it never tells you). So bottom line for any ePUB I send about 70% of the time Amazon can't put it on my Kindle. The 30% of time that it works, there are still formatting errors and it's overall a worse experience.

Hmmm...when I send epub files, they are always able to get onto the Kindle--in fact, it works much better than it used to when I was converting to the dual mobi format using calibre. Where are you getting your epubs from?

Shari

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by lkws1

When you send an ePUB file more often than not Amazon won't be able to put it on the Kindle because it needs to convert it into KFX (I think that's what's happening in the background)...

Actually it is converting to Master-MOBI (providing both MOBI and KF8 formats) using Amazon's Kindlegen software. So far Amazon is reserving KFX, and the associated Enhanced Typesetting features it provides, to published books.

Originally Posted by lkws1

...but it fails for a lot of different reasons (which it never tells you).

Kindlegen is a publishing tool and is designed to be intolerant of errors in the source EPUB. It would be nice for those of us who understand the inner workings of EPUB if Amazon would provide the actual error log that Kindlegen produces when rejecting a book. However I don't see that happening as it would just be confusing to most customers.

If you want to know why a book was rejected you can use Amazon's Kindle Previewer software to find out. The most common reason I have seen is a bad table of contents. Amazon's publishing guidelines require the TOC to have working links that point to non-hidden content and entries that follow the same sequence as the book's content.

Originally Posted by lkws1

The 30% of time that it works, there are still formatting errors and it's overall a worse experience.

The main cause of formatting errors is lack of a declaration of the character encoding being used in the EPUB. The default for EPUB is supposed to be UTF-8 but for historical reasons Amazon's conversion software assumes Latin-1 encoding which messes up characters such as curly quotes. The Modify EPUB plugin for calibre has a function to insert the proper encoding to fix this problem.


It would be nice if there was a calibre plugin that would deal with these issues more automatically.

[JSWolf]

Also check the ePubs for errors using the Calibre editor's error checker and then use the epubchech editor plugin to again check. When both say the ePub is good to go, then you should be set as long as your ToC works.

[lkws1]

Thanks - that's really helpful and in fact I was able to get one of my failed ePUBs loaded onto my kindle by following your instructions. It was a bit of a pain manually deleting each ToC entry and then re-generating it (this seemed to be the critical part) - but it's nice to know the option is there.