Dear Amazon: Thanks for taking a dump on my ebook! (Formatting kindle ebooks on ipad)

(The problem behind this rant has been mostly solved. See bottom).

(This is Rant 1 of 2. In a few days, I will post my rant about  Smashwords)

Dear Amazon.

I’m really mad — no furious — at how crappy your ipad app is for reading Kindle files. Crazy/unpredictable output.

1. Your $#$#$# Kindle Previewer on Windows 7 doesn’t render a preview for ipad after it converts it to  azw. (more)  It registers nothing but a blank page on Kindle Previewer. How on earth do you expect me to test that?
2. If your rendering of azw is so pathetic, don’t you owe it to publishers and authors to document its quirkiness in the Kindle formatting guide?
3. Why doesn’t the Kindle Formatting Guide give an example of a  CSS media query that can hide/display things  on ipad/iphone?  (more)Why don’t you at least update the ios app so that it is even capable of supporting a media query for ipad/iphone?
4. Why on earth doesn’t the Kindle app for ipad support KF8 (or heaven forbid epub)? Don’t you realize how much extra work you are creating for publishers? And how much crappier design you are dictating?

Thank you for taking a dump on my ebook design.   Up until now, you have done a lot of things right; for example I really appreciate your rollout of KF8 onto K4 and K3 devices.  You have some great resources for authors and publishers.

But your ipad app is so terrible that it is almost embarrassing to even open it. Up until now, I have relied on the ipad app to read some Kindle books I have bought. I always knew that the ios app wasn’t up to par. It is only now  — at 4 AM while trying to produce an ebook on a deadline – that I realize how abominable it truly is – for everybody involved.

Up until now, I have assured friends with ipads that you can just read Kindle files on your ipad. I truly was suckered in by your usual propaganda about Kindle-on-all-platforms. Clearly now it is obvious that you are abandoning any pretense of supporting Kindle on ipad. Your ipad app makes the publisher look bad, the author look bad and most of all it makes you look bad.

Get with the program, guys! Either improve the ipad app or just remove it from consumers altogether.

Postscript: Your KDP Community forum is now offline. Wow, that’s icing on the cake!

Postscript 2: Let me be clear. I know how to create designs for Kindle Fires and K3s.  That’s because you have provided adequate documentation about how to do that. I am even vaguely aware of  how to design for K1 and K2.  (it remains a distant nightmare in memory).  I know how to degrade gracefully. What I can’t do is design for an undocumented platform without a good testing tool.

Postscript 3. Ok, I may have exaggerated the extent of the problem. The formatting guide hints that using a media query for the older mobi7 format might do the trick. I can definitely deal with that, so I will try that now. The problem is that nowhere does it say that the ipad app actually renders things in a mobi7 way.

Postscript 4. Well, it’s not a problem I can solve by making a mobi7 media query. I need to confirm that I haven’t done anything stupid, but if this is the case, then it looks like I’m going to have to toss out the design and use a bare bones one. (Sigh!)

Postscript 5:  Here’s the publisher’s note I included on the title page:

Viewing Tips: For a Kindle, this ebook is best when viewed by any Kindle device produced in 2010 or later (or any Android device which has the Kindle software app). For Nook, this ebook is best viewed on any Nook device (or on any Android device which has the Nook software app). Please turn the PUBLISHER DEFAULT setting (on the font size menu) ON. For iPad or iPhone, the book is best viewed if the ebook file itself is imported into iBooks (which can be done if you open it as an attachment from within the iPad).

Postscript 6: Wow, Amazon.com claims that you can email the .azw file to your ipad device, but when I tried, I got this error message:

The following document, sent at 12:10 PM on Mon, Nov 04, 2013 GMT could not be delivered to the Kindle you specified:
* mybook-kindle_2013-11-02_12-12-57_2013-11-04_06-08-20.azk

The Kindle Personal Document Service can convert and deliver the following types of documents:
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
HTML (.htm, .html)
Text (.txt) documents
Archived documents (zip , x-zip) and compressed archived documents
Mobi book

Postscript 7.  I am happy to report that the problem is not as bad as I originally thought. The ipad kindle app actually has decent rendering of the KF8 format. However, my method of sending a kindle file to the iPad was producing a kind of Frankenstein ebook which was neither Mobi 7 or KF8. I used the method of emailing a .mobi file via Personal Docs to the ipad app. Apparently the only acceptable way to test the file on the iPad was to sync it through iTunes. You could email a .mobi file to the Kindle app on the iPad, but Amazon would not do the proper conversion to make this file readable.  I was vaguely aware that testing via Personal Docs had its issues,  but never in my wildest dreams could I imagine that they would be this bad. Of course, this would never have been a problem with better documentation, automatic conversions to AZW on the cloud or native support of epub to begin with. But there is no point in bitching about it any longer — the problem has been solved!