Look Inside behaving oddly

[Notjohn]

For about a week now, the Look Inside sample on the Kindle store has come in two flavors, and the flavors can vary over time. At one point, most of my books were New Style, but today it seems that only about half of them are. The treatment does not vary by upload date. For a while I thought perhaps it was unique to books uploaded in epub format, but that no longer makes sense because I upload all my books that way.

To see the two styles (at least at this moment), I opened the top two Kindle best-sellers. The first is The Things We Wish Were True by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen Link: https://amzn.com/B019K2JGYE

That's what I call Old Style. The Look Inside begins with the cover and scrolls through all the following content.

The number two best-seller is Everything We Keep by Kerry Lonsdale https://amzn.com/B0184ZLSN0

That's New Style. When I click on such a book cover, the Look Inside does a little dance, flicks through several pages, and finally settles on the first page of chapter one. (And sometimes in the middle of earlier matter, such as a pair of epigraphs I saw on one sample, the first being ignored and the second -- by Joseph Goebells, no less -- display.) I think the font is different, too, though not as different as I see in my own books, where not only has the font changed but it doesn't seem to follow normal 1.2 line spacing.

Not only that, but there have been complaints on the KDP forum of books changing their format in recent downloads. One complained that the second half of his book was all italics. Now, that can happen in Look Inside, when there's an unclosed italics (or bold, or center) tag. But within the body of the book, an unclosed tag ought to be closed out automagically at the end of the paragraph that contains it.

FWIW!

[jhowell]

I looked at the free sample for Everything We Keep and found that the start reading location of it is set to the page after the table of contents. That is the same place it opens in the Look Inside viewer. I think that the change may be that the Look Inside viewer now obeys the start reading location for the book sample instead of always starting at the cover.

I believe that the "dance" you are seeing when you open this book is caused by the Look Inside viewer scrolling the window in order to keep your current position (the start location) in view as the book render on screen is being altered on-the-fly because images are loaded asynchronously from the text. For me it works much smoother if I open it again because the images are then cached on my PC.

The Things We Wish Were True doesn't have a free sample so I couldn't check it out the same way.

[Notjohn]

I think that the change may be that the Look Inside viewer now obeys the start reading location for the book sample instead of always starting at the cover.

Aha. I'll check some of my books to see if there's any consistency in the SRL. Since half are New Style and half are Old Style.

I whined to KDP Support and got a rather starchy reply to the effect that The SRL Is Behaving As It Should, which doesn't go very far toward explaining why some do and some don't.

I downloaded Things We Wish Were True as a Prime freebie. When I click on Go To Beginning, it opens just where you say, at the page after the TOC and before the first page of text. It's from LakeUnion Publishing, which is an Amazon imprint, so might be formatted au courant. What language do they use in setting the SLR? (I'm not clever enough to look at the html, I'm afraid.)

[Little.Egret]

I see that some books with Look Inside now allow select copy paste

Is this also new style ?

Neither of your two examples allow this but this (very newly published) does

https://www.amazon.com/Tale-Three-In...dp/B01L2ZLZDC/

example

Copyright © 2016 Pamela Uphoff

[Notjohn]

Interesting. It doesn't work on my books, uploaded through the KDP.

A few days ago I uploaded a revision of an earlier book, in which I set the SRL at the title page. Where earlier it opened at page one, chapter one (and cutting out the chapter title!), it happily began at the cover. Helas, when I checked just now to see if your copy feature was enabled (it wasn't), I found it once again opening at the first page of text, ignoring the chapter title. So New Mode and Old Mode can indeed swap places from day to day.

Later: ah well, I can't copy Pamela's name, either. How did you manage that?

[Notjohn]

Funny note: among those of us nonplussed by this change is Guido Henkel, author of Zen of eBook Formatting, who adds this to his book blurb:

Note:
I would like to point out that the “Look Inside” preview is currently garbled and the formatting is off. Amazon is aware of the problem and working on it, hopefully rectifying the error in their previewer as soon as possible. I think it is important o point out that the formatting in the actual eBook is working correctly and does not suffer from the same flaws.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Interesting. It doesn't work on my books, uploaded through the KDP.

{. . .}

Later: ah well, I can't copy Pamela's name, either. How did you manage that?

Usual Select Ctrl-C and in fact right click Select All then Copy works

BUT both only work using IE11, neither works with Firefox.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

BUT both only work using IE11, neither works with Firefox.

Ah. Copying doesn't seem to work with Chrome, either. (And Firefox is my backup browser....)