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Although setting the guide type of a document to "text" (or %STARTPAGE%) should specify the first page to be shown when opening a Kindle book, this does not work on all devices and previews. Sometimes the start page will appear to be the last page of the table of contents, although it's not clear if this happens in purchased books.
The consensus on the forums is that there is nothing we can do about this. Amazon simply doesn't always respect the start page, no matter what tools you use to create the Kindle file. Some posts seem to offer a solution, such as adding an anchor to an HTML file, but none of these actually work. Some Amazon KDP customers have been told that you can set the start page, and others have been told that KDP sets the start page itself, thus overriding the provided start page.
However, Kindle devices will usually choose a good starting location anyway without defining one explicitly: normally this is after the table of contents. If there is a lot of material at the front of the book before the first chapter, consider placing some of it at the back instead. You can change the position of the table of contents by creating an advanced table of contents and moving it in the outline.
One user reported greater success setting the Title Page as the start page, and having the ordering: Title Page, Copyright, Table of Contents, Prologue. On the other hand, setting the title page as the start page and having an advanced TOC in the project following the title page can erroneously cause Kindle to start at the cover image, and not the title page, so it's probably best not to do that.
A lot of authors worry about this aspect; my advice is not to get to bogged down with it. If it works on some devices, fine, otherwise let Kindle choose a starting point and the reader can find the point at which they wish to start without much effort.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0137: How do I combine several projects into one project? | Next: KB0139: How can popup footnotes be implemented for Kindle?