Dealing with Amazon Kindle where clueless behavior has been consistent

I have had half a dozen iterations with Amazon, and am still not seeing a clue.

My Kindle collection, including C.J.S. Hayward: The Complete Works, is by physical construction converted from submitted, handcrafted, single-page HTML original documents. This and other works open with front matter, including a table of contents built in HTML, clearly intelligible but without any markup saying "This succession of p.table-of-contents containing one link each is a table of contents."

Recently I received a Kindle quality notice that my book should have an NCX table of contents. I've repeatedly asked that Amazon either explain how to do that with a plain old HTML original, or withdraw the request. I've repeatedly been pointed to https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201605710 and failed completely in my efforts to communicate that the instructions given are ePub-specific and not an option in a single HTML file:

2. Use your TOC as an HTML TOC (recommended)
For customers on older devices, this saves many clicks when they want to jump to a part of your book.
Activate a guide item in the Kindle Go To menu to make a link to the HTML TOC accessible from anywhere in the book. To do this, reference your TOC in the navigation document with a landmarks nav element (sample code below).
In the epub:type attribute, set "landmarks" as the value.
In the epub:type attribute, add a link with "toc" as the value.

Sample code: 
<nav epub:type="landmarks">

<ol><li><a epub:type="toc" href="table-of-contents.xhtml">Table of Contents</a></li></ol>  
</nav> 

What, if any, options are there to make any appropriate changes that are feasible within an HTML source, and/or ask Amazon to stop asking for ePub-specific features on a single non-ePub HTML source?

posted over 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Christos Hayward‭

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