Export to Kindle in InDesign

[marcio_muniz]

Could someone help me export an ebook created in InDesign to the reading format on the Kindle?

[JeDesignsGraphx™]

Thank you for your response and information. I will try the above processes, and see if it works. Thanks.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Happy to help and answer questions as needed.

FXL seems like a great choice, the right choice, the easy choice... but it is largely obsolete, it is extremely fragile, the exported files are very difficult to work with, and it does not work as simply a "print to e-page" service. (That is, you can get away with almost any degree of sloppiness and poor page construction for print, or for export to PDF — which pretty much is a "print to e-page" service — but for EPUB export, the source document has to be meticulously constructed and managed, even to get the seemingly simple FXL result.)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'll add this: I know nothing about your abilities or project, but it sounds like the problems trace to the methods. Cookbooks in particular lend themselves to this... did you simply paste all the content onto each page? A text box for the title, another for the ingredients, another for the directions, maybe a decorative edge image, some photos in the middle? InDesign allows this very simple method, but it really doesn't like it and it leads to many problems with things like TOCs, indexing, using styles effectively, and the like. And, while FXL in theory doesn't care about overall "book flow," this piecemeal/pasteup method can throw the export process and lead to the sort of problems you're seeing (in PDF as well, if I read you right — and that's rare).

InDesign really likes a flowing, organized document structure, with one text flow (or a few organized ones) and anchored images and elements. That model is essential for reflowable EPUB export and greatly improves most other outputs, even print.

[mrw76480865]

Kindle are no longer accepting MOBI files. So now what?

[Derek Cross]

Reflowable ePub.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

As Derek says, and to pile on here, reflowable EPUB is the only remaining valid e-book format. It's imperfect, and it's under perpetual (and very slow) revision , which can be maddening when all the players aren't on the same page, but all of the other formats are long obsolete and for good reasons.

But MOBI, even though being the ancestral source for Kindle, was fully deprecated almost two years ago, and good riddance. (Caveat: last time I looked, which wasn't recently, there was still one niche upload model that accepted it, for the "facsimile book" category, IIRC.)

Not quite sure why you're asking here, since MOBI has never been a part of the InDesign workflow. (Unless it was an option with the long-ago, long-dead beta plugin?) But then, there aren't any reliable sources of information on Kindle issues, so if you're an ID user, this is the place to start over. If your background is mucking around with MOBI and conversions and multiple "builder" tools and such, you'll find the InDesign to reflowable EPUB path far more efficient once you master it.

This is an old thread and the info may be outdated; I am going to ask for it to be locked. Start a new topic on any further EPUB issues and questions you might have.