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I am in the process of authoring a Kindle book. I am using MS Word for the authoring. I am following these steps for converting the .DOCX to .MOBI.

MS Word --> Kindle Previewer --> Export to MOBI

I am hoping somebody in this community would be able to guide with me as to how to correctly embed pictures in MS Word so that Kindle does not stretch the images. Example:

Expected image layout

enter image description here

Actual rendition on Kindle Reader for Windows enter image description here

Steps followed for embedding images

Insert tab --> Pictures --> Select file from disk

Using Kindle Create gives different results

enter image description here

I tried the tool Kindle Create. When I preview the book by clicking the Preview button everything looks fine. I am confused now. Should I publish using Kindle Create or Kindle Previewer

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  • Just an observation. If I were to export the DOCX to filtered HTML and then run KindleGen to create a MOBI, the results are as desired. However, Kindle Reader does not honour the Table of Contents. We win some, lose some!
    – Sau001
    Nov 21, 2018 at 9:31
  • Try converting your .docx file to to an .epub file with Calibre then use KindleGen to convert it a .mobi file. If you applied heading styles in Word, the TOC should survive.
    – user4665
    Nov 21, 2018 at 15:13
  • Calibre looks to be good. I did a filtered HTML export from MS Word followed by conversion to MOBI using Calibre. After enduring hours of frustration, I am quite happy with the results obtained from Calibre.
    – Sau001
    Nov 21, 2018 at 17:28

2 Answers 2

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I would like to answer my own question.

What did not work

If you convert the DOCX to MOBI using the Export option of Amazon's Kindle Previewer tool then you are going to face the problem with images stretching horizontally

What worked

  1. Convert the DOCX to filtered HTML (Save As dialog)
  2. Use Calibre to generate a MOBI file by pointing it to the HTML file that was exported out of MS Word
  3. I had to fine tune some settings in Calibre (e.g. show ToC at the beginning). But, the result is very close to what I had expected.
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Using MS Word to author Ebooks is probably the worst route you can use. I author in markdown and convert that to EPUB formats using Pandoc, it's much more reliable and has worked on 2 ereader apps and 2 different KOBO ereaders. Using MS Word is full of pitfalls and bugs.

You can also write directly in Calibre or Sigil then convert to the format you need. After every conversion make sure to check every page of the ebook on several ereaders. Different ereaders will not render the pages in the same way. Especially watch for bulleted material, quoted material, and header formatting, along with images.

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