James Adcock wrote:
As most PG ebooks already contain a TOC inside the HTML, its pointless to generate another one.
Sigh, you are going around in circles. The issue is that you are generating MOBI files that do not correctly implement the TOC standard of MOBI files.
mobigen is generating MOBI files that ...
The result of this is that when a user of a PG file clicks on the dedicated "TOC" button on their e-reader device, the MOBI file you generate fails to take them to the TOC. This is a file format failure on the part of the file format YOU are generating.
Not at all. The epub files I generate validate with epubcheck and the TOC displays correctly on a ADE readers. mobigen then, for whatever reason of its own, fumbles a perfectly valid toc.ncx in a perfectly valid epub file. This is Amazon's problem. I suggest they download a copy of the epub spec and give it to their developers.
Or you could use Calibre ebook-convert software which would do this automatically for you and again everything would actually work.
Calibre is slow and converts everything first to an interim format (Sony LRF I think) which loses most formatting. But foremost calibre is a kitchen sink that has dozens of dependencies some of which I cannot install on ibiblio. E.g. it wants cherrypy v2 whereas I use cherrypy v3 for gutenberg development. (What calibre needs a web application server for is beyond me.)
But, instead you continue to pimp the resulting MOBI file format because YOU think YOU should be the one to choose which devices PG users should be reading on, rather than generating valid files in the file formats that PG customers need to read on the devices they already own.
I use the official kindlegen v 1.0 (as of today) that Amazon says publishers should use to generate files for the Kindle. Save your breath to complain to Amazon, because its their application that is broken and not my epub files. If my files don't pass epubcheck, I will fix them. If Amazon needs some non-standard gimmick inserted because they can't be bothered to implement the spec, then I will definitely NOT insert it.
I think this is silly. Let the marketplace decide. If Amazon acts in an onerous way to customers then customers will choose to buy from Apple and read in EPUB format. If Apple acts in an onerous way to customers then customers will choose to buy from Amazon and will read in MOBI format.
Let me know when `the marketplace´ has fixed the bugs in their app. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org