Kindle e‑books with audio and/​or video – sideloading for testing not possible. Here is why.

Ama­zon recent­ly chan­ged sec­tion 6 of their publi­shing gui­de­lines in ver­si­on 2013.3.

Embed­ding audio and video in mobi files is now pos­si­ble. The descrip­ti­on and sam­ple code on how to do this is com­ple­te. Unfort­u­na­te­ly it does not men­ti­on how to test your file befo­re deli­ve­ring. I tried to sidel­oad my files onto a kind­le fire. The files loo­ked fine, but did not dis­play any of my audio or video con­tent. I cont­ac­ted ama­zon sup­port an got an inte­res­t­ing ans­wer on why this is the case.

Ama­zon uses the old KF‑7 (sic!) for­mat for dis­play­ing embedded audio and video content. 

As of to date the new KF‑8 For­mat does not sup­port audio or video. This means, if you sidel­oad your ebooks to one of the Kind­le fires it will find the KF‑8 ver­si­on of the file in the mobi packa­ge and the­r­e­fo­re not dis­play audio or video …

When the file is sub­mit­ted to ama­zon. They will par­se the file for audio and/​or video con­tent and deli­ver a spe­ci­al­ly craf­ted mobi7 ver­si­on of this file to cus­to­mers with a kind­le fire. Sounds com­pli­ca­ted? It is indeed.

So how could you test your files?
The only way to test ist with kind­le pre­view­er set to iPhone/​iPad mode. This mode dis­plays the KF‑7 version.

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