Content published through Kindle Direct Publishing is held to the high standards customers have come to expect from Amazon. If readers tell us about a problem they’ve found in your book, we will make sure you know about it and point you in the right direction to get the problem fixed.

The information listed here will help you understand the types of quality issues we see most frequently, and will give you an idea of what you should be paying close attention to when building your book.

Typos	Table Errors
Unsupported Characters	Duplicated Text
Cover Issues	Missing Content
Image Quality	Wrong Content
Formatting	Content Unsuited for Reading on Kindle
Links	Disappointing Content

Identifying Errors

It is very important to search your book for errors before uploading the original file or prior to uploading a new file after fixing problems post-publication.

Some errors may cause a book to be considered incomplete or unusable. We refer to these as Critical Issues. Because Critical Issues significantly impact the reading experience, any Critical Issue will result in the book being removed from sale until  corrections are made.

Other errors can prevent the reader from understanding the author's intended meaning. We refer to these as Destructive Issues. The most common type of errors are Distracting Issues, which briefly remove the reader from the author's world.

The combined impact on the reading experience of a book with excessive Distracting or Destructive Issues can lead to the book being removed from sale until the corrections are made. A moderate amount of Distracting or Destructive Issues can result in the book remaining available for sale, but with a temporary quality warning displayed on the detail page of the book on Amazon.com until corrections are made.

Reviewing Your Book

When you review your book for quality issues, we highly recommend that you use Kindle Previewer. This free program will allow you to preview how your file will look on various Kindle devices and apps. If you are using Microsoft Word to build your book, be sure to check out the free Kindle book Building Your Book for Kindle (B007URVZJ6) for tips, tricks, and advice on formatting a successful book.

Typos

Typos are among the most common quality issues customers report. In order to produce a high quality ebook, please  ensure your book is free of typos. Typos may be caused by a variety of issues: mistyped words, poor optical character recognition for scanned texts, copy/pasting across source documents, or multiple conversions of a source file. Here are some examples of common typos to look for:

Example Type:	Example:	Should be:
Numbers in place of letters	5arasota	Sarasota
Incorrect punctuation	The dog ran,	The dog ran
Letters in place of numbers	1o66	1066
Soft Hyphens	re-peat	repeat
Missing letter	Nothi g	Nothing
HTML tags in place of characters	< sup >®	; ®
Junk characters	•”gainst	Against

Fixing and Preventing Typos

If a typo is present in your book, it is important to search for the term throughout the text to ensure all occurences are corrected. It is also important to review your text for errors of a similar nature. The search function of Kindle Previewer can be very helpful for locating and fixing all instances of a repeated typo.

Sometimes improper or dialectic spellings are intentionally used by the author. These are not considered errors. Common examples would include character dialogue. Spelling differences which occur between US and British English are not considered errors.

Unsupported Characters

If your text appears in Kindle Previewer as either strings of jumbled characters or boxed question marks, this usually means your book contains an unsupported accent mark or character. To ensure your book does not contain  unsupported characters, review your book in Kindle Previewer and look for square boxes or jumbled characters like these:

Preventing and Fixing Unsupported Characters

If an unsupported character is present in your book, it is important to look for this issue throughout the text, as one unsupported character is usually indicative of others. Use the search function of Kindle Previewer to locate all instances of an unsupported character. For more information on which characters are and are not supported, please see section 3.1 in the Kindle Publishing Guidelines and the section on Supported Characters in the KDP Help Pages.

Cover Issues

A high quality cover image may have an impact on a reader’s decision to purchase a book. Here are some of the most common issues with covers:

• The cover either has extra space in the margins or is too large and doesn’t fully display
• The cover image is blurry
• The cover is missing
• The cover image is inserted into the manuscript file, causing an error

Creating and Adding a Cover

Be sure to check out the Creating a Catalog/Cover Image Help page to learn more about adding a cover image to your book. You can also find information in Section 3.2 of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

Image Quality

Having clear, readable images in your book is an important part of the reader experience. Images with text can be particularly problematic if the source quality is poor, so make sure that the text is readable on Kindle by previewing it in Kindle Previewer. Also make sure that the images in your book are not blurry as it could be annoying for the reader and may impact their understanding of your content for images that require high levels of detail.

Critical Issues

Do not make an eBook composed of scanned pages of a physical book. Books that are entire scans will be removed from sale, as they become unreadable on Kindle devices and the reader will not be able to change text size. Manga, comics, children’s picture books, etc. are excluded from this requirement.

Below are some examples of other Image quality issues:

• Blurry image
• Image with illegible text

Ensuring High-Quality Images

The best way to ensure your book has clear images is to select the highest possible quality in your source images when importing them into your book. For specific guidelines and best practices for image formatting, please see the section Formatting Images Within Your Kindle Book, and section 3.5 in the Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

Formatting

Formatting issues may affect  the visual or layout level of a title and can include problems such as extra spacing between paragraphs or forced text justification. Formatting errors in your book may prevent readers from customizing their reading experience to their preferences, and also may include issues that cause text flow to be unintelligible or confusing.

In order to produce a high quality book, please do your best to ensure your book has proper formatting. For the best reader experience, we recommend uploading your book content in a reflowable file format such as .doc, .docx, or .html.

An effective way to view your book's formatting is to preview it with Kindle Previewer. This tool can help you identify formatting errors before making your book available for sale.

Ensuring Correct Formatting

Please see the Simplified Formatting Guide for tips on building a well-formatted book. Check throughout your book for similar issues because recurring formatting errors tend to occur throughout the book—for example, incorrectly set left or right margins would appear on each page.

Critical Issues

• Body text rendered as bold, italicized, underlined or hyperlinked text
• Extra body text margin padding that is more than 1/4 of a screen wide
• Primary content is oriented in landscape mode without any detail page disclaimer
• Body text not set to default color
• Forced white text or forced black background that causes text to be unreadable. For example, forcing a code such as Font = white will cause text to be unreadable while reading on a white background mode or on an e-ink device.
• In-line page numbering is present

Page numbers entered within the book file break the flow of the reading experience and must be removed.

Here are some examples of other formatting issues:

• Forced alignment of body text
• The size of the body text is forced, causing it to be larger or smaller than standard text sizes
• Body text incorrectly changes size
  
• Bullet points missing from a bulleted list
• A list has bullets which appear on a different line that the list contents
• Missing list formatting

A best practice is to preserve the reader’s customizable reading experience by not forcing formatting for text.

Lists without proper formatting can be unintelligible to the reader.

• Incorrectly added line break
• Missing indication of paragraph separation (indentation or single line spacing between paragraphs)
• Missing line break that indicates a section or scene change
• A hard page break in the middle of a section or chapter
• Extract or block quote not differentiated from body text

Additional or missing breaks may confuse the reader and break narrative flow.

• Sidebar text interrupts a sentence, paragraph, or section
• A footnote interrupts a sentence, paragraph, or section
• An image interrupts a sentence or paragraph.

Improperly inserted sidebars, footnotes, or images can fragment the reading experience, leading to confusion.

• Extra body text margin padding that is less than 1/4 of a screen wide
• Double spacing between each paragraph
• Consistent incorrectly added line padding between section/chapter headings and first paragraphs

Readers should set their own reading preferences and not have to page forward more than needed.

• Split monograms; the first letter of each chapter in your book should appear on the same line as the rest of the word.
• Individual paragraph incorrectly rendered as bold, italicized, underlined or hyperlinked text
• Forced black text or forced white background that causes text to be unreadable. For example, forcing a code such as Font = black will cause text to be unreadable while reading on a black background mode on color devices.

Links

All links in your book should navigate correctly to the place where the reader would expect them to go, and the user should be able to navigate to the guide items in your book. Please test links, including guide items, on your Kindle device to ensure the links in your book navigate to their intended places before making your book available for sale. If you don’t have access to a device, Kindle Previewer is a helpful tool that will reproduce how content will appear on a device.

Preventing Linking Issues

Broken or incorrect links usually occur when a mistake has been made in the link URL or an incorrect link location has been pasted in. Check the HTML or inserted links in your text to correct this problem. Below are some examples of linking issues we see in books.

• A guide item that does not work—a guide item is the navigational locations that readers can access from the ‘Go To’ menu
• A link in the Table of Contents (TOC) that does not work
• A link at the beginning that takes readers to a TOC at the end of the book
• A link outside the TOC that takes readers to unrelated content at the end of the book
• A link in the TOC that does not follow the chronological order of content appearing in the book
• An unlinked footnote
• A prohibited external link
• An external link that does not work
• An internal link (TOC, Navigational Control File from XML (NCX), or other) that does not link to the correct location
• Reference to an unlinked page number
• Missing Logical Table of Contents (NCX)

Warning: Unnecessary or confusing hyperlinks, misplaced Tables of Contents (TOCs), or the addition of disruptive content that takes readers away from the main content of your book can result in a poor customer experience. If the formatting of a book results in a poor experience or genuine reader confusion, or is designed to unnaturally inflate sales or pages read, we will take action to remove titles and protect readers. This also includes disruptive or unnecessary enticement to click on elements within TOCs. Continued addition of these types of elements in your titles could affect your account status, up to and including termination.