New York Times epub format rejected by Amazon

[mkgtu]

UPDATE on this issue. SO FAR it only happened on just this one day. Every since, the New York Times epub versions emailed successfully to my Kindle address (and to the Amazon Kindle Cloud)


Only happened just today (for now). Was working fine yesterday and previously (EDIT: and every day since). And only for New York Times. Other recipes being download in epub format today are sent to Kindle via email with no problem.

I've tried downloading and (auto) emailing these epub formats for NYT several ways. I've used the regular recipe in calibre. I've used my own customized recipe, which only adds "left aligned" text formatting. I'ver tried the "Web" version. I've tried all of the above with tweaking the recipe to omit all images. ALL OF THEM DOWNLOAD AND ARE FORMATTED AS EPUBS AND ARE PERFECTLY READABLE IN CALIBRE.

BUT on emaiing them to KIndle I get an email from Amazon saying they could not be sent because they are not in an accepted format, even though EPUB is explicitly stated in the Amazon email to be an acceptable format.

I also downloaded the NYTimes and set it to be in MOBI format and that was delivered to Kndle by email with no problem.

In desperation, I also downloaded the Web version as an epub, converted it to AZW3, then used Kindle Unpack to extract the KF8 as an epub. I then used the desktop Send to Kindle app to send that extracted epub by changing the "epub" extension to "jpg". That always works, But not in this case. That file never got to the Kindle. Just to be sure that still works, I used the desktop app to send another epub book with the extension changed to "jpg". That still works. But not for the New York Times.

I then downloaded a couple of other recipes in EPUB format and those were emailed to Kindle with no problem. Actually, this morning, at the same time that the NYTimes was automatically downloaded and emailed, both the Print and Web versions of the Financial Times were also downloaded automatically as epubs and were successfully sent to Kindle via email.

Maybe this is just a weird one day, one-off occurrence. But at least today there must be something on the NYTimes website that is not playing bice with the epub formatting, but it isn't affecting the mobi format. It's creating corrupted epubs that Amazon doesn't recognize as epubs.

Hope this goes away tomorrow. We'll see.

[mkgtu]

By the way, in reply to myself, I have had trouble sending some other epubs (books) to Amazon. Epubs that I have acquired in various places. And occasionally it seems that the actual formatting may not be standardized, or retail quality or whatever, and Amazon rejects them. I can always fix that by converting those epubs to AZW3 and then extracting them back to epub using Kindle Upack's "kf8 to epub". That seems to create a "bonafide" epub that Amazon recognizes as such.
That's why I tried doing that with one of the NYTimes epubs today - unsuccessfully!

[jhowell]

Amazon converts emailed EPUBs using Kindlegen, the same software that is used to process professionally published books. As a publishing tool, Kindlegen is designed to be intolerant of errors in the source EPUB.

It would be nice if Amazon would provide the actual error log that Kindlegen produces when rejecting a book. However I don't see that happening as it would just be confusing to most customers. If you want to know why a book was rejected you can use Amazon's Kindle Previewer software to find out.

The most common reason I have seen is a bad table of contents. Amazon's publishing guidelines require the TOC to have working links that point to non-hidden content and entries that follow the same sequence as the book's content.

[kovidgoyal]

amazon's email intake is horrible. I have seen reports of them rejecting all sorts of epubs that display fine elsewhere. They are going to inconvenience a lot of people with this change.

Personally I suggest you stop relying on the email delivery service. It's too unreliable, for instance, the other day I had a report of it rejecting an epub simply because it had undecodable fonts in it. Fonts are entirely optional, they can be ignored if needed.

A publishing manuscript intake tool is not appropriate for processing general consumer epubs. Par for the course for amazon, though.

[mkgtu]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

amazon's email intake is horrible. I have seen reports of them rejecting all sorts of epubs that display fine elsewhere. They are going to inconvenience a lot of people with this change.

Personally I suggest you stop relying on the email delivery service. It's too unreliable, for instance, the other day I had a report of it rejecting an epub simply because it had undecodable fonts in it. Fonts are entirely optional, they can be ignored if needed.

A publishing manuscript intake tool is not appropriate for processing general consumer epubs. Par for the course for amazon, though.

Unfortunately, I like the email service not only because it's automatic (and I "subscribe" to a lot of items) but also it puts the periodical in the cloud so it's available to all of my several devices (Kindle eReaders and apps). Otherwise I'd have to sideload things onto the eReaders and go through who knows how many hoops to get things onto to the apps on my android phone and iPad. So I'm stuck with imperfection.

But as to the unknown errors in that New York Times epub, it must have been something on the website that day causing the epub anomaly because downloading the paper as an epub and emailing it through calibre has worked fine every day since then. (And it worked fine as a mobi that day).

And all the other recipes have worked fine (I do NYT and the two versions of the Financial Times every morning) London Review of Books download as epub and was auto-emailed successfully today also. Today's issue of New York Magazine was also initially rejected by Amazon, but I later attached it to an email (without redownloading it) and it went through fine on the second try. So, yes, a bit unreliable. Hopefully they'll get the bugs worked out.

But it's a pain to email anything outside of calibre. For some reason Amazon sends you an email asking you "verify your request". Maybe that's because I use a third party email client (several), and I use my regular "FastMail" account address as an "identity" or "alias", but everything is sent through my GMail account on Google's servers. So maybe the request gets flagged for too many email addresses in the hidden "details", making it look suspicious. In calibre I just use my FastMail address and the FastMail SMTP servers.

I've only recently switched to the EPUB format for news because Amazon will stop allowing any new MOBI uploads in August. So it'll be epub or nothing from that point on.

I like the epub news on the Kindle eReaders because it takes advantage of the Kindle's font formatting (various stages of "bold"). The mobi's do not.

What I don't like about the epubs is that, unlike the mobi's, you can't swipe up and down on the page to go the "next" or "previous" article in the publication. Have to keep bouncing back and forth through the TOC or section menus to get to the next article. Especially a nuisance if you only want to skim the first few paragraphs or sentcnces of an article then move on.

[mjfriedman]

I just opened a ticket with Amazon support on the rejected EPUBs issue. Will report back if I learn anything.