While the available formatting tools and fonts on Kindle may be adequate for a Barbara Cartland novel, they are not, in my opinion, sufficient for a technical book.

My attempts to reliably create tables, carefully indented text or embedded formulae were futile.

First, the downloadable readers used to proof the book were, in my opinion, dysfunctional. Their renderings did not match what my physical devices displayed.

I also found that if I copied my .mobi file (built by Amazon's kindlegen program) directly to my Kindle HDX I saw one format. If I emailed the same file to my Kindle account and downloaded it from there, I saw another format. The older original Kindle Fire showed yet another format. If I viewed it with a PC based MOBI reader (e.g., Calibre), I saw another format. Since Kindle viewers run on all manner of phones, tablets and systems, I concluded that I could not reasonably predict what the text would look like for the many readers that go under the Kindle rubric.

My attempts to obtain help from Kindle staff were greeted with the electronic equivalent of your call is important to us and then crickets.

My book, once run through the Kindle formatting meat grinder, displayed in a manner not unlike a pig's breakfast, differing slightly depending upon which of the endless number of apparently incompatible readers, platforms and apps, allegedly known as Kindle, it landed.

My most garbled version was probably the "Look Inside" 'feature' which made it look like it was typed by one of the less talented chimps attempting to grind out Shakespeare.

My advice to a writer, avoid Kindle for technical books and stick to the novel format for which it appears to have been designed. Perhaps someday Amazon and Co. will standardize the platform.

When I lived in Tennessee I once heard a piece of advice worth remembering:

You shouldn't try to teach a pig to sing. It's a waste of time and it annoys the pig.