Trouble with Kindle Previewer?
If you work on a Mac running OS X 10.11 El Capitan (or have just installed Kindle Previewer on an older Macintosh operating system), you might get an error when launching Previewer for the first time. In fact, you probably won’t be able to launch it.
Apple stopped including the legacy Java 6 runtime back with OSX 10.7 (Lion), so this problem occurs with Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, and the new El Capitan.
Here’s the link:
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US
Quit any other applications running Java before installing. This should do the trick.
Amazon’s technical support for independent authors and publishers is so poor that I don’t even both to do much checking with Previewer or anything else. I send Amazon an epub. I look through the processed file to make sure all the pages are there, and then I release it. If it looks bad—as it often does given the poverty of mobi and KF8—that’s Amazon’s fault not mine. I’m not going to deal with the quirks of their proprietary format, much less use their dedicated Amazon-only apps which exist to force authors to only publish with them.
The use of Java to create Previewer is yet another illustration of just how cheap, sloppy, and indifferent to authors and publishers Amazon is. They own 65% of the ebook market and pay worse royalties than any other ebook retailer. They can take the time, make the effort, and spend the money to offer authors and publishers decent tools. That means going with digital publishing standards, supporting InDesign export, and having a platform-specific (i.e OS X) multi-device Previewer that doesn’t look like something from the mid-1980s.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that Amazon only pays half the royalties Apple pays on ebooks whose retail price is outside its narrow “approved” range of $2.99 to $9.99.
Amazon takes more and gives less to authors than any other ebook retailer in the marketplace. It needs to be made to pay a cost for that, starting with exposing how badly it treats authors much as the general press is exposing how badly Amazon treat its employees.