But YOU are perfectly free to volunteer your time to save Amazon some bucks: Take my epubs, patch them, and convert them to mobis that display
the toc when you hit the toc button, and redistribute them on your site. Again, the OPF file format specifies that TOC and NGX are separate things, intended for separate purposes. ADE screws the pooch on this one, providing one interface for both the TOC and NGX. Given that ADE screws the pooch, you and many other epub implementers make a pragmatic decision to target ADE for your generated epubs, generate a NGX, and leave out the TOC. Kindle expects to see both TOC and NGX and uses them for distinct purposes -- as OPF specifies! If Kindle were to emulate ADE's mistakes, then there could also not be a separate TOC and NGX on Kindle, fulfilling their separate purposes as specified in the OPF specification. It is not a question of wasting your time or wasting my time but rather wasting PG "customers" time because what PG is providing today to customers is broken. It would be less broken if there weren't a lot of extra PG verbiage at the start of books making it harder for customers to find the embedded HTML TOC which would allow the customers to navigate to that which they want to read. But it would be even better if customers could push the "TOC" button on their machine and have a TOC actually displayed -- as happens with "real" e-books. Further, the whitewashers' typically require an additional "real" TOC to be implemented in the HTML, which then is also not actually being used, resulting in additional wasted time and energy on the part of the volunteers. PG for example, could simply adopt a convention that a TOC.html be shipped with a submitted HTML, linked into that doc, and then you could link to that TOC.html, and the time and effort that whitewashers are asking of submitters then would not be wasted. It would be fine if you don't want to do it right if PG would allow submission of generated EPUBs and MOBIs so submitters could choose to do it right and not have their time and efforts wasted. But, you don't allow that to happen either! Again, all that these policies today accomplish is that customers get frustrated with PG, take PG books apart and rebuild them properly -- taking off the PG name and verbiage in the process, and redistribute them on other sites. I just think it would be nice if PG volunteers get recognized for the time and effort they contribute by having people actually read "PG" books, as opposed to rebranded ex-PG books where the name has been taken off so customers don't even realize they are reading something which is 99% PG efforts.