Amazon's new KF8 plugin for InDesign

As a writer in InDesign, and publisher of all my tech books in many formats, the tools we have to make ePUBs and Kindle books are really limited unless you are a good coder. Designers are rarely good coders, and writers even less so. InDesign is the best tool we have at present, but there’s still a long way to go until some of the typographic niceties we rely on in print are actually available in an PUB without a lot of hand-coding.

Ron Bilodeau (@biladew) is one of the coders (a very good one, I think). In an email from him this morning, he gave the following advice about Amazon's new KF8 plugin for InDesign:

As usual, formatting ebooks has no good tool yet

They all require coding strength

• The Mobi format is a Kindle/Amazon proprietary product, and therefore, it is not Adobe's responsibility to build around it. It is entirely Amazon's responsibility to provide any necessary plugins to work with InDesign (which they have done).
• The Kindle plugin for InDesign works well for what it does, but it is only useful if you are using ID to build a document with the single purpose of exporting that file to Mobi for use on the Kindle (Legacy e-ink and Fire).
• The plugin only recognizes the most basic of text formatting and anchored images. (again, still need to test the limitations). 
• It does do a good job of creating working hyperlinks based on properly built cross-refs, hyperlinks, ID-generated TOC, and footnotes.
• The plugin will add eBook section breaks based on separate InDesign files only. It does not recognize InDesign's ability to add breaks via. Para style.
• The plugin will also only recognize content order based on the old-school way of ordering: single text thread with inline images or order by placement on page (top-down, left-right). It does not recognize the use of the Articles Panel. (Not sure yet about XML structure order. Still need to test).

Bottom line for kindle plugin use:

• If you are hoping for the ability to export directly to Mobi from a project using your normal workflow, it's not gonna happen!
• The InDesign to ePub to Kindlegen to Mobi is still a far better workflow. And it also allows you to control much better formatting (especially for the Fire).
• The Kindle plugin for InDesign is ONLY useful if your document/project is intended for Kindle only. For that purpose, it works well. 
• But for anything else, it will be useless.

This is type of thing we have to deal with all the time. This is the appeal of iBook Author (as flawed as that offering may be) though it is limited to textbooks and make huge iBook2 documents. As Dave Bricker said this morning, we're still waiting for the game changer.