I am beginning the process of updating our Kindle book. Author revision is a great advantage over our earlier experience working for a publishing company. You can work on your schedule when you feel changes are necessary rather than waiting for the company controlled publication cycle.
Authoring a Kindle book is not a trivial matter. I really like the capabilities of iBook Author, but the decision Apple has made in limiting access to those who own Apple hardware makes this a nonstarter. Kindle does not really offer anything similar to those who prefer the Kindle platform. There are some interesting new capabilities for the inclusion of multimedia – to compete with iBooks I assume. However, the basics of formatting a Kindle book includes some significant challenges.
This is the third time I have reworked our content. What is frustrating is that each time I have to translate my content to the unique Kindle epub format in a different way. I would rather spend my time working on the content. I prefer to write in Google docs because I work from so many different devices and locations when creating. I then have to use other software to convert to the product I can upload to Amazon. In the last iteration, I used Apple Pages. One of the tricky things about Kindle is creating a clickable Table of Contents. The goal when the Kindle book is created is to allow the reader to peruse the Table of Contents and conveniently jump to the topic they want to read. This amounts to internal links (not external links to content on the Internet). Apple’s most recent version of Pages (5.x), took the capability of generating such links out (bookmarks). The rationale for this deletion is not obvious to me.
Google docs has a great way to create a Table of Contents, but I am yet unclear as to whether or not it provides clickable access when converted. Kindle docs are pretty much html plus other files. There are ways to generate the types of links I want in a form of post processing, but the process is not easy.