They suck. They really do.
This is idiotic, tedious, nonsense.
What? The way Amazon decided their idiot eReaders would do things (I never really liked the Kindle and always preferred iBooks to the Kindle App). See, apparently, Amazon in their brilliance decided to use a format that no one else does. Okay, whatever. Thing is … it’s a seriously weird format.
You can’t edit the thing by hand. You just can’t. It supports the NCX Table of Contents in an ePUB … just not as a table of contents. That has to be in the text. Formatted JUST SO using an option that apparently only works right if you use MS Word. Which I don’t. I’m not spending that kind of money on something that broken.
Other options? Yep. Autogen. How? Calibre. Problem. Calibre creates bad .mobi files. Their ToC works, but the formatting goes to hell. You get this weird word wrap thing going on. How do you fix it? You don’t.
Theoretically you can make your .mobi file out of a .odt file and the wrap is correct. This is, relatively speaking, true. Except for the fact that it refuses to generate the CORRECT ToC then. When you CAN get it to do so (I did after much headache and arguing) it turns out that Open Office does very bad things to footnotes that screws them up.
I’m seriously starting to run out of options. My book is selling like crazy, YAY. For free, so I not making a damned dime. And every last person getting it is reading something where the text hyphenates at the end of the line any old place it feels like it.
I can’t seem to fix this. Worst part? AMAZON MAKES A MOBI CONVERTER THAT READS EPUB!!!! Yes, you read that right. Something with a universally standardised ToC, even formatted the way the like, but it’s just not stuck on the ass end of the document but is a separate file (ePubs for those who don’t know are actually a kind of zip file with a bunch of little XHTML documents and CSS stylesheets inside), but does it read that file … yep, as an NCX thing which is either not an option on all Kindles/Kindle readers, is an option but isn’t clickable, or is an option and is clickable, but ISN’T THE TABLE OF CONTENTS BUTTON!
I’m tempted to upload the document without a ToC. But that goes against my better taste. Still, it IS better than a document that wraps unreadably. I may just have to keep fiddling with it.
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