This is an update on our last post about Amazon's recent changes that have affected the display of article titles and authors.
In that post we highlighted a problem with the Kindle Personal Documents Service which resulted in articles sent to your Kindle being shown with the filename as the title, and "Unknown" as the author in the Kindle library view.
Since we made that post, Amazon has made further changes, and we've made some changes to the way we name files in Push to Kindle.
Author display
Amazon has fixed the author issue and it is now being extracted and displayed correctly. We use the author field to display the site you sent the article from (e.g. nytimes.com). So for new articles you send with Push to Kindle, this should now display correctly.
Title display and file naming
Amazon have not yet fixed title extraction. They are still using the filename as title when displaying items in the library view. That means, as we highlighted in our last post, if you go to the popular Gutenberg site and download one of their books and send it to your Kindle, Amazon will not display the title of the book you downloaded in the library view.
In Push to Kindle, we set the filename based on the title. But up to now we only allowed a very limited set of characters in filenames. Non-Latin characters, or accented characters, would be removed from the file name.
We have now expanded the characters we accept for file naming to more accurately reflect the title. So new articles sent via Push to Kindle should have better title display in the Kindle library view. This change is now also active for EPUB downloads from the Push to Kindle preview screen.
Push to Kindle Android app
If you use the default 'Kindle' send mode in our Push to Kindle Android app, you might find that your name (as set in your Amazon account) will display as the author name.
Until Amazon addresses this issue, you can change the send mode to 'Kindle email' and enter your Kindle email address. This can be done via the Settings screen of the Push to Kindle Android app.
Article image used as cover
If you use a hardware Kindle device, e.g. the Paperwhite, the latest software update (5.15.1) introduces a change related to cover images. We've never set cover images in the files we produce, this has resulted in the title and author of the article being displayed instead. In a recent change Amazon now uses the first image in a document as the cover image.
Until we find a good solution for this, we recommend you tap into the Library view from your home screen. Here you should see title and source site in the display. If you don't, use the sort/view button and under 'View options', select 'List'.
Feedback
Please let us know if you experience any issues related to these recent changes.