epub converted to mobi won't start in right place - Page 3

Notjohn · 06-19-2016, 02:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitch

Praise Jesus. We're saved.

Hitch

Evidently so. I have twice updated the mobi file, just to test the robustness of this result, and by golly it continues to open at the first page of chapter one.

So it seems that we can indeed force Amazon to start the book at the place it wants to start the book. What an extraordinary amount of effort in order to surrender!

mattmc · 06-19-2016, 06:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Evidently so. I have twice updated the mobi file, just to test the robustness of this result, and by golly it continues to open at the first page of chapter one.

So it seems that we can indeed force Amazon to start the book at the place it wants to start the book. What an extraordinary amount of effort in order to surrender!

Huh, sweet.

Now, this is expected behavior, right? It's been this way for a while yet, no?

If this is were a new development, I'd be curious what happens if you try to set it before the TOC?

Hitch · 06-19-2016, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattmc

Huh, sweet.

Now, this is expected behavior, right? It's been this way for a while yet, no?

If this is were a new development, I'd be curious what happens if you try to set it before the TOC?

AFAIK, all joking aside, Amazon's been "fixing" the SRL location to the first chapter during the PW (Publishing Workflow) for a while now. I don't know how long "a while" is, but...some months.

Offered FWIW.

Hitch

jcsalomon · 06-21-2016, 02:56 PM

A book I’ve just typeset had its EPUB start location set to Preface.xhtml, just after the TOC (nav.xhtml) and just before Chapter01.xhtml. Kindlegen produces a file that correctly opens where I want it to. And Amazon set the SRL to Chapter 1.

Here’s the entire body of the preface, as the author wants it displayed:

Code:

<body>
  <h2 class="sigil_not_in_toc">Once upon a time [author’s text elided]</h2>
</body>

I know there won’t be any guarantees, but has anyone had any luck with something like this? Perhaps if I included a dummy

Code:

<h1 style="display: none;">Preface</h1>

or something like that?

On second thought… Hmm, I’d been abusing the <h2> tag for this formatting. What happens if I add this Preface to the TOC? I’ll get back to this thread after I’ve tried it.

stumped · 06-21-2016, 03:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitch

Gosh, and I think that I feel old....

As a not-publisher, in terms of frame of reference, the contretemps over this--the kerfuffle, if you will--is unclear to me. I am familiar with the issue over putting links from the front to the back, to drive payment for unread pages. (n.b.: I confess that it's not clear to me, either, if this REALLY happened, or if there was some flurry of people abruptly putting worthless links from the front to the end of the book, or if it was apocrypha.

Hitch

It is true
. I had a game guide from KU. TOC sent me to a single page of actual relevant guide at end of book. Before that, visible in Kindle for PC, were 200+ pages of misc junk, including a wedding planner guide, in French.
Checked a different book, same authors, same dirty tricks, I see they are no longer listed, I could not figure why this was done until I read about the payment per page scam and how me reading the final page got them a 200 pages read payment.
Ultimate game guides were the scammers, I think.
In my same one month trial I found several books with exactly ten pages. That was an earlier scam,.
Amazon previously counted a KU book as read , and paid out ,once 10% had been reached, so simply opening a ten page book was an immediate 10% done, money please.
KU is a scammers paradise, there are several other scams ongoing.
http://selenakitt.com/blog/scamazon-...ting-millions/

Hitch · 06-21-2016, 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jcsalomon

A book I’ve just typeset had its EPUB start location set to Preface.xhtml, just after the TOC (nav.xhtml) and just before Chapter01.xhtml. Kindlegen produces a file that correctly opens where I want it to. And Amazon set the SRL to Chapter 1.

Yup. You're uploading a MOBI, I'm inferring, from your information?

Quote:

Here’s the entire body of the preface, as the author wants it displayed:

Code:

<body>
  <h2 class="sigil_not_in_toc">Once upon a time [author’s text elided]</h2>
</body>

I know there won’t be any guarantees, but has anyone had any luck with something like this? Perhaps if I included a dummy

Code:

<h1 style="display: none;">Preface</h1>

or something like that?

On second thought… Hmm, I’d been abusing the <h2> tag for this formatting. What happens if I add this Preface to the TOC? I’ll get back to this thread after I’ve tried it.

Gotta say, yes, that's abuse. I'm unclear as to why you think creating a heading class for that would do anything whatsoever for the SRL? We use heading classes for all our headings, not to be redundant, e.g., "preface," "acknowledgements" and so on, and I don't see that that's had bupkus to do with it. What's your thinking?

Amazon's position--and trust me, I've had scads of emails with Seattle's KDP department about this--is that the SRL *will be set* to the first page of relatively full text, after the TOC. Period. However, if the author-pub emails them, post upload, once the book is on sale, the every-day KDP will adjust the SRL, generally speaking, to where the author-pub wants it to be. That's been our experience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stumped

It is true
. I had a game guide from KU. TOC sent me to a single page of actual relevant guide at end of book. Before that, visible in Kindle for PC, were 200+ pages of misc junk, including a wedding planner guide, in French.
{SNIP}
KU is a scammers paradise, there are several other scams ongoing.
http://selenakitt.com/blog/scamazon-...ting-millions/

My ponderment is, how does that possibly work? Obviously, the tricked reader will return the book to Amazon, and tell them why. Payment isn't made instantaneously to the scammer, so...I can only assume that the entire thing is contingent upon the scammees (the readers) NOT reporting the scamming book to Amazon, AND, having received it via KU, so that the scammer gets the payment from KU on pages read.

So--the simple way to kill off scammers is for the reader/purchaser/downloader to report the book to Amazon. Amazon would "return" the book, and deduct any payment.

It's on the readers, then. I did some very rough math last night and I think we can safely assume that 1,000 books a day have been published pretty much every single day--7/days/week--since the first day of 2010, on average. Amazon would need 125 people doing NOTHING but book-checking (8 books/day per checker) to keep up with that. If I were Amazon, AND I did that, bygod, I'd be taking more than 30%.

That's my $.02. If the reading public makes even a tiny effort--any effort at all--the scammers won't get a dime. But expecting Amazon to do everything--including finding every scamphlet--that seems unreasonable, to me.

Yes? No?

Hitch

mattmc · 06-21-2016, 10:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitch

Amazon's position--and trust me, I've had scads of emails with Seattle's KDP department about this--is that the SRL *will be set* to the first page of relatively full text, after the TOC. Period. However, if the author-pub emails them, post upload, once the book is on sale, the every-day KDP will adjust the SRL, generally speaking, to where the author-pub wants it to be. That's been our experience.

Hm. You'd think that there could be a way to set this so you don't have to call Amazon every time. Like, they could just dictate some additional piece of metadata, "reallyActuallySRL" that can be set by people who know what they're doing, and the KDP machinery will obey it?

(Unless...they do that because of this whole KU thing?)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitch

My ponderment is, how does that possibly work? Obviously, the tricked reader will return the book to Amazon, and tell them why. Payment isn't made instantaneously to the scammer, so...I can only assume that the entire thing is contingent upon the scammees (the readers) NOT reporting the scamming book to Amazon, AND, having received it via KU, so that the scammer gets the payment from KU on pages read.

So--the simple way to kill off scammers is for the reader/purchaser/downloader to report the book to Amazon. Amazon would "return" the book, and deduct any payment.

I haven't actually done KU, but my understanding is that you can just download and read whatever you want. Is the concept of "returning" relevant here? The user expects to be able to just read whatever they want because of their periodic payment, so a junk book would probably be "huh, that's stupid, let me find another book" as opposed to "I want my money back!"

stumped · 06-22-2016, 02:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hitch

My ponderment is, how does that possibly work? Obviously, the tricked reader will return the book to Amazon, and tell them why. Payment isn't made instantaneously to the scammer, so...I can only assume that the entire thing is contingent upon the scammees (the readers) NOT reporting the scamming book to Amazon, AND, having received it via KU, so that the scammer gets the payment from KU on pages read.

Hitch

it was actually quite clever, in a thieving sort of way. As I recall ( book is long since returned) on an actual kindle you saw an "1st page! with a big click here to go to the guide. and you can't actually navigate to the 200 + pages of crud in between. that stuff is not in the TOC But scroll up/down in Kindle for PC or get it into Calibre editor & the scam is revealed.
the entire game guide is one html page, the padding was many many other html pages

as for "return the book" folks are not going to bother return a book that cost them nothing to read via KU [ i did leave a blistering review] so scammer wins. via the link I posted there are brags from scammers of earning $1000s per month from Amazon via these scams and you tube videos from scammers teaching other scammers how to do it.

consider also that scammers can repeatedly " read" their own books on throw away KU trial accounts, to ramp up payments even more.

It left me with a sick feeling of having helped finance a nasty trick & I will not be rejoining KU any time soon. It is nasty because KU is a finite pot, so what the scammers suck out reduces the payout to genuine honest authors

there are other scams now running involving keyword stuffing and " cliffs notes" type books masquerading as the actual novels they rip off

from the link previously posted:
Amazon’s continued “fix” to these problems are like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. Because guys like Dave Koziel aren’t just making money off Amazon. He’s making money off selling this method to other scammers and telling them how to make money scamming, too. And the more they scam, the more money they take out of the “pot.”

Check this link out. Apparently a 15-year-old mentee of Dave Koziel made $64,000 in a month. That’s not a typo.

Do I think this kid wrote all those words? Not if he’s following Dave’s advice, he’s not.

..

Quoted on those images, Dave Koziel says: “A screen shot I got earlier from my mentee and coaching student @justin8600 For those of you who don’t know what this is it’s a report from Amazon that shows you your actual royalty payments from the Kindle store. Take a close look at these numbers and you’ll see how much money he is actually getting paid this month from Amazon. Did I mention he’s only 15? A lot of you may look at this and think it’s fake. How can a 15 year old possibly make $70,000+ in a month online from selling ebooks on Amazon? The world is changing and fast. ...”

Notjohn · 06-22-2016, 06:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattmc

If this is were a new development, I'd be curious what happens if you try to set it before the TOC?

Well, I never tried that, because I put the TOC first, followed by the title page, for two reasons. First, I'd like the book to start at the beginning, which in a real book is the half-title page, but I know that's impossible, so I would like it to start, thank you very much, at the title page.

And second, I'm not allowed to start with an image, because the included cover will suppress it. (I've tested that, too, with this book.)

Perhaps I should explain that I've decided to follow Mr Knopf and Mr Doubleday and Mr Penguin and use an image of the print title page in the e-book, to avoid its being split in the Look Inside and to force better design on it. Also I've noticed that the Look Inside suddenly seems to have followed the old Kindles and DX in ballooning images to their maximum size--i.e., Look Inside too doesn't obey a width= instruction.

In my experience, if "text" is set anywhere but the first page of the first chapter, the book will open in the middle of the TOC. Which is pretty funny, really, if the intent is to beat the KU scammers, since it adds a couple pages to every reading experience.

Incidentally, I don't think it's true as has been posted here that a second "reading" of a book adds to the KNEP or whatever it's call, the page count. Nor do I believe anyone is making $70K a month playing these games, unless it's the guy selling the system to the marks.

dgatwood · 06-24-2016, 01:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Perhaps I should explain that I've decided to follow Mr Knopf and Mr Doubleday and Mr Penguin and use an image of the print title page in the e-book, to avoid its being split in the Look Inside and to force better design on it.

I do the same (but only for KF8 where I can use SVG; old readers just get text).

It might be worth pointing out that if you have a PDF of the print edition, you can create a PDF containing only a single page by using pdftk. For example, to get page 13 as a separate PDF, you might do:

Code:

pdftk book.pdf cat 13-13 output titlepage.pdf

And then you can trivially convert that to SVG using Inkscape. For example, on OS X:

Code:

/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/script --without-gui titlepage.pdf --export-plain-svg=titlepage.svg

You can also do --export-png=titlepage.png for a MOBI7 fallback, if you want one.

Notjohn · 08-13-2016, 06:37 AM

FWIW, Amazon has changed the way Look Inside starts the book. Instead of opening at the cover, it seems to do a little dance (I can see the cover flitting by) then opens at Chapter One. I haven't checked a whole lot of books, but those I have, open that way.

Except for one! Isaac's Storm in its Kindle version does the little dance, then opens at the TOC. Evidently that's because there is no Chapter One. (On my Kindle, the book opens at the wrong place, skipping "The Telegram" and "The Beach," both of which should be read if the book is to be understood as the author wrote it.)

Hitch · 08-13-2016, 02:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Notjohn

FWIW, Amazon has changed the way Look Inside starts the book. Instead of opening at the cover, it seems to do a little dance (I can see the cover flitting by) then opens at Chapter One. I haven't checked a whole lot of books, but those I have, open that way.

Except for one! Isaac's Storm in its Kindle version does the little dance, then opens at the TOC. Evidently that's because there is no Chapter One. (On my Kindle, the book opens at the wrong place, skipping "The Telegram" and "The Beach," both of which should be read if the book is to be understood as the author wrote it.)

Well, I'm sure that this will create some new chorus of moans.

BUT, you cannot tell anyone that the readers don't want to read the frontmatter. Amazon's use statistics on this are pretty convincing. Nobody looks at the cover once the book is bought, or any of the frontmatter. Frontmatter, these days, exists solely for the LITB, and now--maybe not even that.

The funny part, to ME, is that you still have to PUT IT in the front, regardless. We've just had another client with a KQN, who'd insisted up, down, left right and center that we had to put the TOC at the back of the book. Right?

Wrong. His note arrived Thursday: "Sigh. Just fix it and charge me." :-)

Hmmmm...maybe I'll make that a whole new income opportunity--we'll make one with the TOC at the back, one with the TOC in the front, and when, not IF, you get your KQN, you can just slap the new one in. Ha!

NJ, I do not believe that

Quote:

In my experience, if "text" is set anywhere but the first page of the first chapter, the book will open in the middle of the TOC. Which is pretty funny, really, if the intent is to beat the KU scammers, since it adds a couple pages to every reading experience.

the intent about the text location had bupkus to do with scammers. That's been in existence for several years now. Long before the advent of KU and pages-read and all that.

Oh, and the LITB never, ever, obeyed any width instruction shy of 100% that was set for KF8, and you can't set percentages for KF7, which is a discussion that you and I have been having, vis-a-vis images, for some years now. What the LITB did was display images at 100% of their OWN size--not a size set by someone in the eBook. This is why images that were intended to be seen, by the bookmaker, at, say, 30% of their original size are NOT displaying nicely in the LI. If it's going to be in the front, at least, for now, you have to make it the final size you want it in the LITB. No %'s need apply, as they say.

Hitch

Notjohn · 08-14-2016, 07:18 AM

Quote:

Oh, and the LITB never, ever, obeyed any width instruction shy of 100% that was set for KF8, and you can't set percentages for KF7, which is a discussion that you and I have been having, vis-a-vis images, for some years now.

We have? I don't recall it. I've never said otherwise, at least about KF7. As for Look Inside, the only problem I've ever had with images is that I wasn't able to wrap text around thumbnail portraits that were sized at 20%. They were (and are) sized correctly, however. Be happy to send you a link.

(As for the ones sized to 100%, they fill the width of the text, just as they are supposed to. Perhaps this is only coincidental. I upload images 800 pixels wide. Again, be happy to send you a link.)

I have solved one problem that KF7 posed to me, and that was the colophon for my publishing imprint, which I had been sizing at 15 percent. Naturally it got rather large in the "Kindle" preview (I no longer have an early-model Kindle). So I am now following the lead of Doubleday and the other Big Dogs, and uploading an image (sized at 100%) for the title page.

Hitch · 08-14-2016, 04:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Notjohn

We have? I don't recall it. I've never said otherwise, at least about KF7. As for Look Inside, the only problem I've ever had with images is that I wasn't able to wrap text around thumbnail portraits that were sized at 20%. They were (and are) sized correctly, however. Be happy to send you a link.

Yes, we really have. You've been giving people the 100%/800px advice for a long time. I am fairly sure, NJ, that I have repeatedly mentioned that while that works just fine if you have an image that is large enough or has enough rez, and is intended to go margin-to-margin, that the 100% could EASILY overdrive an image, if it's opened in a desktop viewer, or the LITB.

Quote:

(As for the ones sized to 100%, they fill the width of the text, just as they are supposed to. Perhaps this is only coincidental. I upload images 800 pixels wide. Again, be happy to send you a link.)

Yes, that's exactly right (coincidental). The image is blowing up to its native size--the 800px--NOT the 100% instruction. KF7 does not, ever, obey %. At least, through last week, it did not. And the LITB is, effectively, KF7. Not 100%, but it's a hell of a lot more KF7 than it is KF8.

Quote:

I have solved one problem that KF7 posed to me, and that was the colophon for my publishing imprint, which I had been sizing at 15 percent. Naturally it got rather large in the "Kindle" preview (I no longer have an early-model Kindle). So I am now following the lead of Doubleday and the other Big Dogs, and uploading an image (sized at 100%) for the title page.

Well, you haven't solved it, per se; you've worked around it. In terms of precision of language, those really are two different things. I'm glad, mind you, that you've found a solution that suits you. However, the issue--that you can't really size your colophon graphic without some "jumping through hoops"--still exists. Although, if you sized it the size (physically, so to speak) that you wanted it on the LITB, it should work fine. FWIW.

Hitch

Notjohn · 08-16-2016, 07:41 AM

What can I say? Not only have I never had an 800-pixel-wide image go pixelated on my desktop or on Look Inside, the older ones (even back to the 450-pixel recommendation of the early years) are acceptable. Not great, but okay. I would assume that nobody in his right mind would upload a 200-pixel-wide image with a 100% instruction, but I will certainly add that caution. You may well have pointed this out on the KDP forum, but I don't remember it. Believe me, I pay attention to everything you say, and have stored much of it on my computer for future reference.

I just checked the Look Inside for the book that uses thumbnail portraits. They are exactly the same size (two of these portraits appear in the Look Inside) and to my eye they are exactly the same width (35 mm on my monitor) and almost exactly 20% of the text width (176 mm).

And wow, I just noticed! The colophon is sized correctly! So do you know what seems to have happened? The new Look Inside now handles this stuff just as one would wish. How about that? I have been slanging Amazon's decision (I LIKE the sample to open at the cover), but now I'll have to modify my stance.

Thanks for opening my eyes to what has (or seems to have) happened.

06-21-2016, 02:56 PM	#34
jcsalomon Zealot Posts: 100 Karma: 1204 Join Date: Jun 2012 Device: Bookari (née Mantano Reader) on Android; Kindle Fire HD	A book I’ve just typeset had its EPUB start location set to Preface.xhtml, just after the TOC (nav.xhtml) and just before Chapter01.xhtml. Kindlegen produces a file that correctly opens where I want it to. And Amazon set the SRL to Chapter 1. Here’s the entire body of the preface, as the author wants it displayed: Code: <body> <h2 class="sigil_not_in_toc">Once upon a time [author’s text elided]</h2> </body> I know there won’t be any guarantees, but has anyone had any luck with something like this? Perhaps if I included a dummy Code: <h1 style="display: none;">Preface</h1> or something like that? On second thought… Hmm, I’d been abusing the <h2> tag for this formatting. What happens if I add this Preface to the TOC? I’ll get back to this thread after I’ve tried it.

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08-13-2016, 06:37 AM	#41
Notjohn mostly an observer Posts: 1,515 Karma: 987654 Join Date: Dec 2012 Device: Kindle	FWIW, Amazon has changed the way Look Inside starts the book. Instead of opening at the cover, it seems to do a little dance (I can see the cover flitting by) then opens at Chapter One. I haven't checked a whole lot of books, but those I have, open that way. Except for one! Isaac's Storm in its Kindle version does the little dance, then opens at the TOC. Evidently that's because there is no Chapter One. (On my Kindle, the book opens at the wrong place, skipping "The Telegram" and "The Beach," both of which should be read if the book is to be understood as the author wrote it.)

08-16-2016, 07:41 AM	#45
Notjohn mostly an observer Posts: 1,515 Karma: 987654 Join Date: Dec 2012 Device: Kindle	What can I say? Not only have I never had an 800-pixel-wide image go pixelated on my desktop or on Look Inside, the older ones (even back to the 450-pixel recommendation of the early years) are acceptable. Not great, but okay. I would assume that nobody in his right mind would upload a 200-pixel-wide image with a 100% instruction, but I will certainly add that caution. You may well have pointed this out on the KDP forum, but I don't remember it. Believe me, I pay attention to everything you say, and have stored much of it on my computer for future reference. I just checked the Look Inside for the book that uses thumbnail portraits. They are exactly the same size (two of these portraits appear in the Look Inside) and to my eye they are exactly the same width (35 mm on my monitor) and almost exactly 20% of the text width (176 mm). And wow, I just noticed! The colophon is sized correctly! So do you know what seems to have happened? The new Look Inside now handles this stuff just as one would wish. How about that? I have been slanging Amazon's decision (I LIKE the sample to open at the cover), but now I'll have to modify my stance. Thanks for opening my eyes to what has (or seems to have) happened.

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