Continuing to Push KDP In a New Direction

Dear KDP:

I converted my .epub file to the .docx format and was able to open it in Kindle Create. My reaction is as follows.

I would like the cover and some of the images and videos to be able to bleed to the edges of the screen.

It looks like Kindle Create doesn't implement position:absolute, float:left/right; z-index:-1, font-family:sans-serif, @font-face, @keyframes, small caps, audio/video autoplay, JavaScript, border-radius, transform:rotate, filter:drop-shadow, margin, image aspect-ratio, body background-color, text-indent, image alpha-channel, or text-decoration:none.

What it does well is page-break-inside:avoid, font color/size, section re-ordering, small inline images, drop-cap, div background-color, hanging indent, and white-space:nowrap.

When I tried to add paragraph first-line indents, I noticed that it only affected the paragraph where the cursor was positioned. When I tried ctrl-a to select all, nothing was selected. Each paragraph would need modified individually.

You can imagine how reluctant I am to go through the daunting task of making the changes with Kindle Create. The book is around 90k words. I have about 40 original music cues that would need to be inserted individually, and about 20 videos. But without position:absolute and z-index:-1, videos and still images wouldn't be displayed properly.

I understand that probably the vast majority of KDP's submissions need to be guided through the process with Kindle Create so that crazy-quilt books can be published as nice-looking books. Kindle Create perfectly fills that need. Some writer/designers, however, want to push the edges of the standard novel into entirely new areas and create an entity that needs a new name, like the meNovel, for multimedia eNovel, or something like that. It's innovation, creating something that didn't exist before.

I can't believe that one of Jeff Bezos' companies wouldn't be interested in innovation. Jeff Bezos' company? Amazon changed how the world buys things. William Shatner was able to break the record as the oldest astronaut. This is a very small innovation by comparison, to let a writer/designer position a stylish video behind the text to play as the reader continues reading. A book already completed in the ePub3 format. This suggestion, of course, is coming from a very insignificant writer, but imagine if Fifty Shades of Gray had been a multimedia novel. Can you imagine the number of downloads?

I hope KDP will open a new gate for writer/designers like me to try new things. The gate that's available now is too restrictive.

The Kindle Previewer

My feedback to Kindle Direct Publishing:

I’ve just paged through my multimedia novel with Kindle Previewer and I’m excited that we’re getting closer to the point where a reader can experience a media-heavy eBook as the writer/designer intends. I think of the multimedia novel as an entirely new medium that is situated between standard novels, movies, games and apps and can utilize aspects of all of them. Because a multimedia novel is primarily text, it doesn’t work well as a fixed-format eBook, but the current state of eReaders doesn’t allow for careful formatting to flow along with reflowable text. However, the ePub3 file format does, and it’s just a matter of getting eReader developers to utilize all of the features available in the ePub3 format.

A standard novel is displayed beautifully on most eReaders, and that doesn’t need to change. But the features available in the ePub3 format are just too tempting for a very visual writer to ignore, and in the multimedia novel, the writer/designer asks the reader to relinquish some control over the display of the novel so that the writer/designer can provide a unique experience. Some readers would, of course, react with something like “I don’t think audio or video have any place in a novel,” and they’re right regarding the standard novel. The multimedia novel would exist side-by-side with the standard novel and not influence its design, but the multimedia novel shouldn’t be squeezed into the parameters of the standard novel.

After some research, I’m still not clear on where the KF8 format and the Fire eReader fit in with ePub3. I used Sigil to create my multimedia novel, and the Sigil preview panel displays it with all the features I’ve written into the xhtml except audio autoplay. Sigil doesn’t paginate, and so I don’t know if it observes page-break-inside:avoid. Kindle Previewer displays most of what my xhtml includes, and additions I would like added to it are discussed below.

A small thing, but I would like the book to open with the cover rather than page 1. Most cover designers put a lot of work into designing the cover and would like the reader to see it as more than a thumbnail image.

I would like the option to have no margin imposed on the display of the eBook. Designers of eBooks would like to have option to bleed images to the edge of the page that print designers have.

I don’t know if portal dimensions apart from the physical screen dimensions are used to calculate the layout of a page, but I would like a width of 100% to refer to the edges of the actual glass of the device, or its physical display area, if different from the glass. The aspect ratio of full-bleed images should be retained, of course, and not stretched to fit the screen, but using the physical dimensions would seem to provide consistency with image bleeds on devices with different dimensions.

When I choose text-decoration:none, I would like an underscore not to be imposed on the text. In my table of contents, a light background color indicates the live aspect of the links, and the imposed underscore degrades the page design. When I include a link in the body text of the book, I underscore it in the CSS.

I’m happy that small inline images and large images behind body text are displayed correctly. Thanks! Well done.

I’ve designed a few pages so that video behind text and audio will autoplay on page-turn. Please enable that. As a notice to the human reader, I’ve included a symbol at the end of the previous page that audio will begin on page-turn. I’ve also included a play-pause button at the top of the page with audio/video so the reader can stop the playback if desired. Instead of the default controls, I provide an inline play-pause button whenever audio and video are available. In a context like this, I think the concerns regarding misuse of autoplay are addressed.

When returning to a previous page, the amount of text displayed is sometimes different than it was when the page was initially viewed. It seems that it would be good if the layout of each page were frozen when first displayed. The reflowing of the text going forward is good, but, assuming there have been no changes to the text or layout, having the text reflow on paging back isn’t really necessary and could lead to confusion.

Please allow for the alpha channel of .png files. Currently, the transparent areas display as black.

When an image behind the text appears at the bottom of a page, it can be displayed cropped on the page and then uncropped on the next page. The test for page-break-inside:avoid should probably occur earlier to avoid displaying the cropped image.

Thanks for incorporating @font-face and allowing changing the color of portions of body text. I haven’t encountered that often with other eReaders. Some of my text I’ve reformatted with font-family:sans-serif, but it displays as serif like the surrounding text. I would like it to render as the device’s default sans-serif font.

Please enable transform:rotate(), filter:drop-shadow(), and window.navigator.vibrate().

Please enable changing the background color of the body tag and disabling the selection of background color by the human reader. This change from the norm is probably the one that is the most important in educating the reader that the multimedia novel is a different platform and the reader is asked to relinquish some control over its display. When used judiciously, background color can significantly enhance the reader’s experience.

I positioned a video behind the body text with margin-top:-5em, and the result is that five lines of text overlap the text above it. An odd glitch occurs in the same chapter. The last two paragraphs are displayed about 20 paragraphs early, overlapping part of the text where they appear, and the chapter ends without those paragraphs. In the xhtml, those two paragraphs are preceded by an audio file and a JavaScript script controlling the playback of that audio file. Two other scripts appear earlier in the file and the text renders correctly, except for the first overlapping text. In total, the file includes a background-color change in the body tag, two images behind the text, scripts for two audio files, and a script for a video file behind the text.

Some of the subsequent chapters exhibit similar misplaced paragraphs and incorrectly positioned .jpg images.

In the Conversion Log, the message “Please remove the audio/video tags and ingest the source” appears frequently. I don’t know what is meant by ingesting the source. The audio files are stored in an Audio folder and referenced with ../Audio/someaudiofile.mp3. The video files are referenced in the Video folder similarly.

Including an image within paragraph tags is useful for vertically positioning a floated image, but it inherits the paragraph’s margins. Please support negative margin values with the CSS float property.

I appreciate very much your interest in feedback from users of Kindle Previewer.

My Letter to Gideon Levy

Dear Mr. Levy: 

I've just read your article "Gideon Levy Took a DNA Test and Found Out the Truth About His Ancestors' Link to Israel." A fun read. Made me chuckle quite a few times. I learned of you when reading Don't Say We Didn't Know by Amos Gvirtz. He refers to your work very favorably. I've been wondering who to contact of those wishing to expand the public's knowledge of Israel's expansionism. On learning that you're The Most Hated Man In Israel, I thought I'd start at the top and then work my way down. If you would provide a foreword or review of my novel, I would greatly appreciate it. If you have a fee for providing such a service, please let me know. 

 My novel focuses primarily on the conflict between the political ideologies of the left and right in the US. My personal identification is as a progressive, but I chose to tell the story from the viewpoint of a conservative confronting information he hasn't heard before. Because of the right's determined support of Israel, the Herodian Temple and Mt. Moriah found their way into the story. The central character is a theme-park designer and the conservative media studio where he works is building a Disneyland-style theme park. They intend the park to be as secular as the Disney and Universal parks, but they also want to subtly counter Disney's mildly progressive messages, like "It's a small world after all," with more conservative messages, like "In America we speak English." The title of the book is Just to the Right of Disneyland. Tucked into a corner of the park, which is divided into eight very different lands, is the themed area that will recreate the Jerusalem Temple from early in the 1st century. Since a park of this sort could see 10 million guests per year, it arouses the ire of groups which remain unnamed throughout the book, and they blow up a truck on the Temple construction site. (The current Bible-land park in Orlando sees only a small percentage of the guests that Disney parks see, and so its Temple replica isn't as threatening.) A progressive professional woman enters the story and urges the designer to eliminate the Temple attraction rather than building a reinforced structure around it to protect it, as they're planning. In subsequent meetings she proposes adding a replica of the Dome of the Rock and moving the Temple replica to a location just to the south. Her belief that this would remove the threat to the Temple and ensure the safety of guests convinces the reluctant studio and they begin construction. Bombs are subsequently discovered at both construction sites before they detonate, and the future of that part of the park is left uncertain. No one claims responsibility for any of the bombs. It's left up to the reader's political predisposition to decide who is responsible. 

In the meetings, the professional woman, from a family of lawyers, Jewish on her mother's side, Anglican on her father's side, discusses Israel's expansionism. She argues that the joy conservatives will feel when visiting the Temple replica will reinforce an already positive view of Israel and further obfuscate the methods Israel uses in its expansion. I have the central character, and everyone he knows, unaware of any human-rights violations committed in Israel's return to land God had given them centuries ago, because I was unaware of it until a few years ago, and as a conservative Baptist years ago, that was my perspective then—it was Israel's land, the Palestinians were merely housesitters. I have the woman offer the argument that after 18 centuries of non-governance, since the Bar Kokhba revolt, some kind of statute of limitations would apply to Israel's current claim to the land. The land, as I understand it, had been under continuous Muslim control since Saladin regained Jerusalem in 1192. She argues that an unwitnessed verbal agreement between two parties is very hard to defend when there's a dispute with a third party. She also argues that any other nation forcibly retaking land that had been theirs centuries ago would precipitate multilateral resistance, like Iran reclaiming Babylonia, and Indians reclaiming the Americas. 

Does this sound like a project to which you could lend your influence? Its primary market is American readers, of course, but America seems to be the most in need of the information. With the popularity of theme parks around the world, the fun framework of the theme park in the story would broaden the book's appeal to a wider market. 

Thanks very much for reading.