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Testing Kindle books | Testing Epub books | File transfer
It's important to have confidence that your ebooks will look good on a variety of devices, before you upload them to book distribution sites. Here are some ways you can preview and test your books. Also, don't forget to press the Check button for your Epub books to let EpubCheck verify the book is syntactically correct.
Kindle Previewer shows your Kindle books with different modes that you can select to emulate different devices. The iPad and iPhone are supported only by means of a file conversion and uploading to a real device - of which more shortly. Previewer is available for Mac and Windows only. If you are running Linux, you can test on a real Kindle device or the Kindle app on a tablet or smartphone, or make do with testing the Epub version.
Jutoh can help you download and install Kindle Previewer, via the Help Me Install Kindle Previewer button in Preferences/Helpers. If you let Jutoh install it, you will then have the option to show your book with Previewer via the Launch button after you have compiled your book using the Kindle configuration.
To install Previewer manually, visit the Amazon Kindle Publishing page, and see these instructions for manually configuring Jutoh.
Unfortunately, Kindle Previewer doesn't show a preview for iPhone and iPad, and to test on these platforms, you need one of these devices. However, the chances are that if your book looks good in the other Kindle Previewer modes, it'll be fine on iOS. Here's how to test the file on an iOS device.
Compile your book in Jutoh with the Kindle configuration.
Open the .mobi file in Kindle Previewer, by clicking Launch if Jutoh is configured to launch Kindle Previewer.
In Kindle Previewer 2, click on Devices | iOS, and let it convert the file to .azk format. In Kindle Previewer 3, you need to use the menu command File | Export; change the selector to AZK, and save the file.
Run iTunes on your computer and attach the cable from your computer to the iOS device.
Click on the relevant iOS device icon in iTunes, then click on File Sharing.
Under Apps, click on Kindle.
Add the .azk file from your local disk using the Add button.
In the Kindle app on the iOS device, click Sync, or just wait a few seconds.
The book should appear and can now be viewed.
Note that if you transfer the .mobi file, for example by uploading it to a web site, downloading via Safari, and then choosing Open in Kindle, you will see the KF7 version of the file, with poorer formatting. This is also true of using iCloud, or Amazon's Send To Kindle to transfer the file. Only the above procedure will allow you to preview your file for KF8, including fixed layout books.
Amazon now state in their guidelines that using Kindle Previewer is a better way to preview your Kindle books than sideloading to an actual device.
If you install Kindle for PC or Mac, it will be the default viewer in Jutoh when you press the Launch button. The formatting you get on this software is not always the same as on mobile devices, so it is probably better to use Previewer. Also, you will need to remember to delete the book from your Kindle for PC or Mac library before pressing Launch or you may see the old version, leading to confusion about the changes you make in your book.
To use the Kindle app in your Android smartphone or tablet, transfer your .mobi file to your device and then use a file manager app to copy it to the "kindle" folder on the memory card (on newer versions of Android, it may be need to be copied to the folder Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files). Open the Kindle app, and your book should appear in the library. Or, use Amazon's Send to Kindle application (see below).
To view your file on a Kindle device, use the USB cable, or Amazon's Send to Kindle application (see below), or upload the file to a web site and download it via the device's web browser. Or you can email the file to your Kindle - it used to be the case that KF8 formatting was stripped when doing this, but it now appears to preserve advanced formatting.
There are several Epub readers you can use for testing your Epub books.
If you install this on your Mac or PC, Launch will use it as the default viewer for Epubs. ADE is not the last word in Epub viewing and some behaviour is different from other Epub readers. But you should at least make sure that your book behaves correctly on ADE.
ADE 4 supports some Epub 3 features but uses Internet Explorer to do this and is a bit slow and buggy.
AZARDI can handle both Epub 2 and Epub 3 files, and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. So particularly if you intend to create Epub 3 files, it's a great way to test your files.
Beware of an issue that can cause confusion if you preview changed versions of your book: AZARDI seems to over-enthusiastically cache CSS files so formatting may disappear if, for example, you switch on Abbreviate style names in your configuration and relaunch AZARDI. One solution is to rename the Epub file before launching it again in AZARDI.
At the time of writing, AZARDI has trouble with media overlays, with delays in highlighting content and playing audio at the wrong place.
If you have an iOS device, you can transfer Epub files to Apple Books through iTunes or other means such as downloading via a web browser, and open them in Apple Books. Apple Books is now available for Mac on Max OS Mavericks (Mac OS 10.9) and above, so Jutoh will show Epub files using Apple Books by default using Jutoh's Launch button.
If you install Calibre, an Epub viewer is installed which you can configure Jutoh to use, or you can open the files directly from Calibre. It's quite a compliant viewer and handy to test a book that seems to be misbehaving in other readers.
To test your files using the Nook Android app, on some versions of Android you can use a file manager app to copy the Epub file to the Nook/My Documents folder on the memory card. The book will then appear when you next run the Nook app. Or, transfer the Epub file to your device, for example by downloading from a web site, and open the file from a web browser or file manager, choosing the Nook app when prompted.
On the PC or Mac version of Nook, go to My Stuff and then Add Item, and add your book. To delete the book (for example to view a new version of it) you will need to go to the My Barnes & Noble eBooks folder and delete the file. Then relaunch the Nook application.
Note that on Nook for iOS, paragraphs that should be centred may not be, and everything may be (wrongly) justified. To fix this, touch Aa in the Nook app, then More Options and Publisher Defaults.
Kobo is popular in some parts of the world, and can view fixed layout books using the Apple Books fixed layout format or Epub 3. To view a local file on the desktop version of Kobo, view your file in Adobe Kindle Editions, and then in the Library tab of the Kobo application, press Shift+Ctrl+S. The books will be shown, possibly without cover or name which makes selecting the right book hit-and-miss.
You can also use a Kobo device, or the Android or iOS app which allows you to import local content. To view a fixed layout book on eInk devices such as the Kobo Aura H2O, you will need to rename your book file extension to .flx.kepub.epub, which you can have Jutoh do automatically by setting the configuration option Book file name to %FILENAME%.fxl.kepub.epub.
For more information on preparing and previewing files for Kobo, please see https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec.
To show local Epub files in Google Play Books, go to https://play.google.com/books and click on Upload Files. Be aware that Google Play Books has its own rendering quirks; in particular, page breaks sometimes fail to work.
Fixed layout books may initially display incorrectly in landscape mode on Android, but switching to single-page mode and back seems to fix that.
This Epub reader is available for Android and iOS, and has a nice interface and good Epub 2 conformance. Transfer the file to your device and launch the file choosing the Bluefire Reader app.
Bluefire Reader is also available for PCs, and is a convenient, unfussy alternative to using ADE 4.
This Epub reader is available for Android. It has a wide variety of visual options; unfortunately, it does not support embedded fonts.
Gitden Reader is available for Android and iOS, and is a highly conformant Epub 2 and Epub 3 reader. One of the interesting things about this reader is GitdenAir, a program (not free) that makes it easy for you to upload changes from your desktop machine to a phone or tablet.
On Windows 10, you can use the Microsoft Edge web browser to view Epubs. However, when adding Edge as a helper app, you can't choose the Edge executable directly since it's a Metro/Modern/Univeral app. To work around this, you can use this launcher utility: www.emmet-gray.com/Articles/EdgeLaunch.html. Install this, and specify the Edge launcher executable when adding an Epub helper to Jutoh via Preferences/Helpers.
Jutoh 2 has a command to quickly preview the current book section in a web browser: Book | Preview Section. The currently selected configuration will be used to create the preview. This can give a good approximation of how the content will appear, and can be used to quickly test changes in JavaScript code, for example.
To avoid interference with your normal browsing, drag a tab out of the browser, size it appropriately, and keep it in front of the other browser window so that it will be used for the preview.
If you want to see all the content in your web browser as separate sections, and not just the current section, you can select the HTML configuration, compile and then use Launch.
To see the whole book as one big HTML document, select the Content folder and then use Document | Show Documents in Browser. However in this form, section-specific features such as CSS and JavaScript will not be included.
Other software you can use to test Epubs include Cool Reader (Windows, Linux, Android); FBreader (Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, Blackberry, has rather dated Epub support); Aldiko (Android); the Readium Chrome extension (with Epub 2 and 3 support); Blio Reader; and the EPUBReader add-on for FireFox.
These are some of the methods you can use to get your book from your desktop machine onto another device.
You can use the command Book | Upload for uploading files to a device via file copying or email. For more details, please see Uploading your book in the Jutoh manual.
If you copy your compiled Epub or Kindle book to your DropBox folder, you can then use DropBox on your phone or tablet (not iOS), synchronize so the file appears in DropBox, and export the file to your memory card or internal memory. From there, if you need to show a Kindle file, use a file manager app to copy the file to the kindle folder (or export it there in the first place from DropBox).
Some e-ink ereaders have web browsers, so if you can't use Dropbox directly on the device, you can still access your Dropbox folder in a web browser and load the book from there.
You can copy files to specify iOS applications using iTunes, as described above under Kindle for iOS.
If you have upload access to a web site, you can copy it to a location there and then use the web browser on your device to download and open it in the appropriate application.
Note that this doesn't work properly for Kindle files and Kindle for iOS - only KF7 formatting will be preserved. So you need to use the iTunes method instead.
If you're a techie like me, you might use a script to make it easier to upload a file to your web site, along with the 'curl' command-line application that makes it easy to upload a file in one command.
Most Android devices will allow you to transfer files from a computer to the device by connecting the power/data cable. You can also use an SD card reader on your computer together with a micro-SD card adapter (USB or full-size SD card); but if the SD card slot on the device requires the back to be removed, this isn't very practical.
Amazon provides a separate Send to Kindle application, so you can open or drop a Kindle .mobi file (not .azk file) from your desktop file system and have it sent to one or more of your registered Kindle devices. Unfortunately it is not possible to control this application from another application, or Jutoh would be able to provide a way to do this automatically after generation. Also, when sending to an iOS device, only the KF7 component will be viewable. However it will work fully for Android devices and KF8-equipped Kindle readers.
Amazon allows you to email Kindle files to your Kindle reader; it used to be the case that only the KF7 component would be visible on your device, stripping out advanced KF8 formatting, but emailing now works fine on Kindle Paperwhite devices and probably others.
As mentioned above, this program allows you to send Epub files from your desktop computer to devices running Gitden Reader. GitdenAir will detect changes in the Epub and refresh the reader automatically.
Calibre has facilities for wireless transfer of files using a mini content server built into the program, accessible via a web browser on the mobile device. There is also an Android app called Calibre Companion that can help you wirelessly access the books in your Calibre library.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0117: Why are string tables not working in my book? | Next: KB0119: Why are some images in my book duplicated?