In this step, you’ll do test conversions of your HTML to
Kindle book format and check the results. You may also want to disassemble the
Kindle book file for study or troubleshooting.
Let’s get one thing straight right now: If you do
not test your book, it is not likely to come out as you want. You cannot count on anything—Word, Amazon KDP, this
book, or even a designer you hire—to produce a flawless book. Serious Kindle
publishing requires at least a reasonable amount of testing.
Better to find the problems yourself than to read about
them in one-star customer reviews!
•
Originally, the chief difficulty of formatting for the
Kindle came from its substandard, deficient ebook format. Nowadays, the chief
problem is that there is no one Kindle. There are several families of Kindle,
both hardware and software, with a variety of members in each family, and more
than one basic format spread across them. So, formatting for the Kindle is much
like designing Web pages in the 1990s, when designers had to deal with multiple
Web browsers and their generations, each one interpreting HTML a bit
differently. In other words, it’s a mess.
Here are the families of Kindle.
Kindle. The
original Kindle, with its e-ink screen, has evolved through several generations
and has now split into two models, with and without a keyboard. Kindle DX was
an earlier, larger model.
Kindle Touch and Kindle Paperwhite. The Kindle Touch, with its touch screen, has evolved
into the Paperwhite, adding backlighting and high resolution. It is the most
advanced of the e-ink Kindles, and the one most likely to cause formatting
problems.
Kindle Fire. This
is Amazon’s tablet, with a customized Android operating system. The Fire comes
in different sizes, while HD models have high-resolution displays.
Unfortunately, the Fire has been optimized for movies, with its screen much
taller and narrower than that of any other Kindle.
Mobile Kindles. These
include Kindle apps for tablets like iPad, Android, and Windows 8, and for
smartphones like iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. They tend to
lag in capability.
Desktop Kindles. For reading on your computer. Includes Kindle for PC
and and Kindle for Mac. They’re available for free here:
Kindle Cloud Reader. For reading in a Web browser. Supported browsers
include Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Access it for free at
Besides producing all these varieties of Kindle, Amazon
has adopted two completely different ebook formats to be read on them. The
original Kindle format was called Mobipocket, or MOBI, after the company that
created it and that was then acquired by Amazon. This is a rudimentary,
outdated format designed for older cell phones. It is still the basic format
for many Kindles.
Starting in 2011, Amazon began a move to Kindle
Format 8, or KF8. This is a more modern format, similar to EPUB in many
ways, but still proprietary. It’s currently used mostly on the Kindle Fire and
the Paperwhite. Amazon has said it would migrate other Kindles to KF8 but has
been slow in doing so.
When the Kindle converter processes your book, it
converts it to both MOBI and KF8 formats and packs both into a single file. One
or the other format is then chosen according to the Kindle being used, and
sometimes even according to whether the book has flowing text or fixed format.
And of course, the interpretation of either MOBI or KF8 varies from one type of
Kindle to the other.
Can you see now why it’s so important to test for a
variety of Kindles?
•
Amazon provides more than one option both for converting
your files to a Kindle book and for previewing it before final submission. At
various times, you might want to choose different methods. Let’s look at the
options.
Online. The simplest and most direct methods of converting
and previewing your book are provided on the Amazon KDP site itself. That site,
again, is at
Once you’ve signed up for an account there, you can
also start the setup for your book title. That lets you upload and convert your
files any number of times for testing before you’re ready to publish.
You can even set up a book title you never intend to publish, and use it to test any book or to
just experiment. At this writing, for example, the titles on my KDP Bookshelf
include Test and Test
2. They allow me to test new versions of a
book already published—such as
this one—without disturbing the finished files I’ve submitted earlier or taking
the chance I’ll release a draft by mistake.
Upload and conversion normally take only a minute or
two. And since this is also the method you’ll use for final submission, you
know you’re getting the most reliable result possible. (For more on procedure,
see the upcoming section on “Submitting.”)
When your book is ready, you can click “Preview book”
to see it in KDP’s online previewer, which allows you to choose among several
different Kindle models for emulation. But though this is the easiest way to
preview, even Amazon warns it is not that accurate, especially for pictures.
Personally, I almost never use it, and I recommend you ignore it, too.
Desktop. After conversion, Amazon KDP will also offer the
option of downloading both your book and a previewer to run on either Windows
or Mac. Though not perfect, this Kindle Previewer provides the best possible
look at your book without seeing it on actual Kindles. The Previewer can also
be downloaded here:
When you launch the Previewer, it opens a window with
option settings, helpful links, and Amazon announcements—including notice of
Previewer updates. You can open your book through the File menu, but you can
also just drag and drop it on this window. To get multiple preview windows for
comparisons, just launch the Previewer more than once.
As with the online previewer, you can choose among
several Kindle models to emulate, selecting from the Devices menu for Kindle
families, then from the top tabs for individual models. You can test both
external links and internal navigation, and change settings where applicable
for screen orientation, font size, font face, and color mode—Normal, Night, and
Sepia. To spot problems, you should test as many combinations of device and
settings as practical.
Though the Previewer allows you to change font size, the
default Size 3 will give you a sense of what will fit a single Kindle screen by
default. This size will no doubt look too big to you, but remember that the
Previewer is displaying a magnified view. Of course, you’ll need to change font
size for the iPhone!
As valuable as the Kindle Previewer is for previewing,
it has another, less-known capability worth almost as much: It can be used to
convert your HTML file to a Kindle book! Amazon’s Kindle converter is built
right into the Previewer. All you need do is open or drag in your HTML file,
and the Previewer will handle the rest.
The conversion provided by the Previewer is not quite
as good as the one you get at Amazon KDP. Specifically, your cover will be
missing, and you may also get error messages for navigation—like telling you
that your Kindle book lacks a table of contents. Still, joint converting and
previewing in the Previewer lets you run quick and mostly accurate tests of
formatting without the need to visit Amazon KDP and wait for processing. Most
of my experiments for this book have relied on the Kindle Previewer for both
previewing and conversion.
Another advantage of converting in the Previewer is
that you get access to a log of what Amazon calls “Compilation Details,”
including warnings and error messages. These can be valuable in pinpointing
errors in your files or in just studying how the converter operates.
Instead of running directly on Windows or Mac OS, the
Kindle Previewer relies on a cross-platform system add-in called Java; and on
the Mac, also on another add-in called X11. These dependencies sometimes cause
problems in running the program. If your Previewer isn’t working properly, see
the section in the Appendix on “Previewer Problems.”
The Kindle
converter—formally called KindleGen—is also available on its own, for use on
Windows, Mac, and Linux. Direct use of KindleGen is too geeky and marginal to
discuss in this book, but if you like, you can find the program here:
On Kindles. If
your Kindle book works well on the Kindle Previewer, it’s more than likely to
work well on actual Kindles. Still, it should be obvious that the ultimate test
is to try it on the Kindles themselves. Of course, no one expects you to have
access to every single Kindle model. But almost anyone can get their book on
one or more.
You can start with one of
the free desktop Kindles for Windows or Mac. Again, they’re available here:
Once installed, these apps will open your book automatically
when you just double-click it.
The tricky part, though, is that the app will also add
the book to your desktop Kindle Library, which you access through the app. The
next time you double-click that book on your desktop, or even just a book with
the same file name, it’s the copy already in your Library that you’ll see. To
make a newer version open instead, you’ll have to either make sure the new file
has a different name or else delete the old version from the Library. (If you
convert with the Kindle Previewer, it automatically gives your book file a
unique name.)
If you own a major type of tablet or smartphone—Apple,
Android, Windows, or Blackberry—then Amazon has a Kindle app for you. So, you
have another Kindle for testing.
You may already have one or more of Amazon’s hardware
Kindles for your own reading. On the other hand, I’m often surprised to find
people wanting to publish on Kindle who don’t own or use one themselves and may
never even have held one.
Kindles are now cheap enough that, if you’re serious
about Kindle publishing, there’s seldom a reason you can’t own one or more just
for testing. For my own tests, I have one Kindle from each major family—a
latest-generation basic Kindle, a Kindle Paperwhite, and a 7-inch Kindle Fire
HD. All together, they cost no more than a single Adobe publishing app!
To get your Kindle book onto most hardware Kindles, all
you need do is connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cable you use
for charging, or one like it—one with a micro USB plug, for all but the oldest
Kindles. In the Kindle’s directory, you should see a “documents” folder where
you can drop your book. The Kindle Fire, though, is more complicated and varies
from model to model, so refer to your user’s guide or search online for
instructions.
A simple alternate method
that works for all Kindles is to use one
of Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop applications, available for Windows or Mac.
Find them here:
These apps upload the file to Amazon, which turns
around and sends it back to any one or more selected Kindles via Wi-Fi or
Whispernet. In most cases, you’ll want to tell the app not to archive the document in your online Kindle
library. Along with that, make sure your Kindle is set to show what’s on your
device, not in the Cloud. Also note that, for a Kindle Fire, your book will
wind up in the Docs section rather than under Books.
Reportedly, sending a Kindle book to your Kindle by
email can strip out advanced features—so, if you try that, do so cautiously.
•
Inspecting your Kindle book is an optional procedure that
involves taking apart the book package and looking at its component files. It’s
particularly useful for checking on how the Kindle converter has processed your
pictures. It can also be used in troubleshooting your book’s formatting and
navigation, if you’re familiar enough with HTML.
If you know much about the
EPUB format, you probably know that it’s actually a collection of files in a
Zip archive. That makes it easy to take apart and put back together. A Kindle
book too is a collection of files, but packaged in a less common format—a
Python database. To take it apart, you need a utility called KindleUnpack
(formerly MobiUnpack). It can be downloaded from the first post in this forum
thread:
KindleUnpack requires some
version of the Python software language to be installed on your computer. Macs
already have it. For Windows, you can download free versions from either of
these locations, among others:
What you’ll see after unpacking includes files and
folders for two different versions of your Kindle book—the Kindle’s old MOBI
format (here called “mobi7”) and the newer KF8 (here called “mobi8”). Each
version will have its own HTML file for the book contents, and its own set of
image files.
Enjoy!
•
If previewing shows that you need to make changes, do not make them in the HTML file—or at least not just in there. Go back to your Word document and make
them in that. You want to maintain that document as a source file you can
easily change at any time and then convert again quickly.
Appendix—Previewer Problems
You may have trouble starting the Previewer if you are on an
older, 32-bit computer running Windows 7 or Vista. In that case, Amazon advises
you to set the Previewer’s compatibility mode to “Windows XP (Service Pack 3).”
To do this, right-click on the Previewer shortcut in your Start menu, click on “Properties,”
and go to the Compatibility tab.
•
On both Windows and Mac, the Kindle Previewer relies on
Java, a cross-platform system add-on. This means that problems with the
Previewer may stem from incompatibility with the version of Java on your
computer, possibly resulting from Java updates. At one point, for instance, the
Previewer worked on the Mac only with Java 6—the last version issued by
Apple itself—while failing with Java 7—a version more up-to-date but
issued by another source.
By default, the newest versions of OS X don’t
include Java at all. But they should prompt you to download and install it when
needed.
•
On the Mac, the Kindle
Previewer’s Paperwhite emulation relies on an archaic system add-on called X11,
which any commercial software developer would be ashamed to use. If you don’t
already have this on your computer, the Previewer is supposed to prompt you to
install it. You can then download and install XQuartz, the X11 version that
comes from an independent source but is supported by Apple. Find it at
To make it work after installaton, you’ll have to log out or
restart and also consent to allow “webreader” to accept incoming network
connections.
The problem is, you may not get a prompt if X11 is
already in your system but in an older, incomplete, or incompatible version.
The Previewer may then open but go into an endless round of error messages when
you try to view your Kindle book on Paperwhite. And it doesn’t help that
Paperwhite is the Previewer’s default for initial display of your book.
If you run into such
trouble, your first step is to uninstall
each of the following two folders that may be in your usr folder.
X11
X11R6
Don’t know where the usr
folder is? It’s at the root of your primary hard drive or partition, along with
Applications and System—but, of course, it’s invisible. So, to get to the
folders inside usr, you must have a utility that makes all your hidden files
and folders visible, or else use this command in your Terminal utility:
sudo rm -rf /usr/X11/ /usr/X11R6/
Note that Terminal won’t show your password when you type it
and won’t tell you the folders are deleted. You’ll just see a new prompt. You
can then install XQuartz.
If you get really desperate, you might consider running
the Windows version of the Previewer in a Windows emulator like VMWare Fusion.
