Kindle ebooks

digital brain

Mysteries of the ToC

When I published my latest novel on Amazon KDP several months ago, the automated quality checker popped up a yellow triangle and notified me that I had failed to add a linked table of contents. It wasn’t a deal-breaker for publishing, but a deficiency nevertheless.

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Except that my Word document did include a perfectly good linked ToC. I tested every link. All of them worked. The problem, I realized, was I had created the ToC following the Smashwords Style Guide, which has step-by-step instructions for adding bookmarks to the chapter headings and hyperlinking to the relevant spots in the text. I began my publishing adventure at Smashwords, so thought this was the right way to make a linked table of contents.

Smashwords Style Guide cover

Except that whatever program ingests Word docs at KDP and spits out Kindle ebooks doesn’t recognize a linked ToC created that way. It looks for a ToC generated by Word’s automatic ToC creator (which I’ve never used). Because I publish my books on both Amazon and Smashwords, I use near-identical copies of a single Word doc (with the necessary adjustments to the copyright page) for both. But when I look at one of those books on my Kindle, instead of the full list of chapters in the “Go To” drop-down, the only sections I see are Beginning, Page or Location, Cover, and End. And yet, if I go to Beginning and page forward, there’s the ToC. And the links work exactly as they should.

I’ve been resigned to this state of affairs, with vague notions of maybe disassembling the ToCs on my Amazon documents and rebuilding them the “proper” way, and then republishing, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Fiddling around with Word isn’t high on my “Fun Things To Do” list. And republishing is a pain.

So What? yellow sticker

What I did do, though, for a different reason, is experiment with emailing ebooks to my Kindle. Kindles (and other devices) have Amazon email addresses. This was news to me, but it’s helpful when someone sends you a PDF of a book and you want to read it on the handy-dandy little reading device.

Kindle e-reader

As an experiment, I emailed my Kindle one of my early books published on Smashwords. Thinking that Mobi files are Kindle-friendly, I selected that version and sent it as an attachment to the special email address. Surprisingly, I received an email from Amazon, informing me that “We wanted to let you know that starting August 2022, you’ll no longer be able to send MOBI (.mobi, .azw) files to your Kindle library.”

Well, surprise, surprise. Even more surprising was the information that Amazon considers Epub a compatible format. So I emailed the Epub version of the book. When I turned on my Kindle, there it was, cover image and all. Yet another surprise was that despite the notice, the Mobi version was there as well, but minus the cover image.

The final surprise was—ta da!—both versions included a linked ToC in the “Go To” drop-down, even though it was created using bookmarks and hyperlinks, just like the one that wasn’t acceptable when I uploaded the Word doc to Amazon KDP.

So the Kindle’s “Go To” displays ToCs perfectly well after the Word doc has been turned into either an Epub or a Mobi, even if that processing was done by Smashwords’s “Meatgrinder.” But Amazon’s processor doesn’t recognize ToCs created by anything other than Word’s automatic ToC generator. Hence the admonishment that you really should include a table of contents to enhance the reader experience. With the accompanying yellow triangle, of course.

blue flames question mark

I suspect this issue may be avoided by uploading Epubs directly to Amazon, but to create an Epub myself I would have to use Calibre or a similar tool, and I haven’t so far been motivated to learn how to do that.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of thing, with tables of contents or anything else?

Updating an Ebook is Harder than I Thought

One of the good things about self-publishing in ebook form with Amazon KDP is you can correct typos and other errors easily. Make the changes in your base document, upload it to KDP, press Publish and you’re done, right?

Yes and no.

Readers who buy your book after you publish the corrected version will get that version. But what about everyone who pre-ordered it or bought it before you discovered those pesky typos? You’ve assumed the corrected version will be automatically delivered to their reading devices, right?

Probably not.

One of the authors whose blog I follow recently published an updated and corrected version of an ebook. Being aware of this, I was eager to reread the book in its new form. When I checked my Kindle library (note: I don’t own a Kindle reader; I read Kindle books on a tablet using the Kindle app), I found only the original version of the book.

I thought, Okay, I’ll just buy a copy of the improved edition. No luck–Amazon told me I already own the book. So I went to “Manage Your Content and Devices,” where I found all the Kindle books I’ve ever bought. One of them–just one!–had “Update Available” below the title. The others did not, including the title I wanted to update. Yes, I have Automatic Book Update turned On in my Amazon account. And yes, I tried clicking Select next to the title and then clicking on Deliver at the top of the page, then designating the device I wanted the book delivered to. No soap; I’m guessing that because the ASIN is the same, I’m stuck with the original version.

This was confirmed by further digging in KDP’s Help pages, where I found one called Send Updated eBook Content to Customers. This page specifies exactly what an author has to do to enable an automatic update to be sent to people who have purchased the book.

You have to contact Amazon. The errors have to be “serious.” “You need to provide us detailed examples of your improvements regarding the quality errors.” And “You need to send us the ASIN, detailed examples of the corrections you made, and the Kindle location number. Location numbers are the digital equivalent of physical page numbers and provide a way to easily reference a place in your reading material regardless of font size.” I’m quoting from the page I linked to in the preceding paragraph.

There is also a list of changes Amazon will NOT accept. One of them is “significant changes that warrant a new edition.” I’m guessing a new edition would be an entirely new book, with a new ASIN. That’s where I gave up.

My takeaway from these investigations is: Make sure your Kindle ebook is perfect before you publish it for the first time. Or be prepared to make a case to Amazon for pushing out your changes to customers. Almost like in the bad old days of offset printing, where making a correction was difficult and expensive.

I would be delighted if anyone can tell me (on good authority) that the above is all wrong. Has anyone been able to download a corrected copy of a Kindle ebook you’ve purchased? And finally, has anyone gone through the steps described above to correct a book you’ve published?