Quote:
Originally Posted by Freaky Dude
Tearing my hair out over
1)MOBI formatting,
2)whether it converts every image to a JPG, and
3)its bloated file size:
I have (for me) a huge concern. I have two illustrated moose joke books ready to go. At least I thought they were. Yes, moose. Silly with lots of drawings (a couple hundred), one book for kids, one for adults. There's a page break after each "page" so the reader gets the riddle/joke on one page, then goes to the next page for the answer. I composed it in Dreamweaver, have used some CSS, and employed some transparent GIFs for little antler headers and to help space the images. The books look great on Apple's Book Proofer and Adobe Digital Editions in their ePub formats (which I created via Calibre). Lately, I have converted every image to a JPG or a GIF. (I preferred PNGs, but Kindle definitely degrades them.) But does KDP deface GIFs as well? Does it convert EVERYTHING inside a book to JPGs or can I save my GIFs?
If they do, I guess I can convert everything to a JPG, say 60% quality (with all the little artifacts that show up). It's not what I want, but it's possible. But I'd have to create alternate spacing mechanisms to place images. Or can you create an empty "block" with nothing in it to occupy space that Kindle would recognize? If not, I could create these "tasteful" vertical moose stripes to separate elements. But then, my Kindle version would have a slightly different look to it than my cleaner ePub version. Same main course, but with different spices.
Can I have a slightly different Kindle edition of the joke book than my ePub version (with two different ISBNs, which is already the case)? Or do both versions have to look the same?
Finally, is the MOBI file of an ePub file always going to be three times larger? If possible, how can I compress it? (Kindle apparently says they're not taking third party MOBIs anymore -- I read that here -- that you have put everything through Kindlegen, which I haven't really figured out yet.
Thank you so much for your time, everyone. Any help/suggestions will be appreciated.
Daniel
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Images in Kindle books must be 127KiB or less. If your images are larger, they're going to get converted to JPEG and compressed to make them that size.
My advice for line drawings would be to try saving as 4-bit or 2-bit greyscale GIFs.
KindleGen output is huge. That's because it contains three versions of your book. One in Mobipocket format, one in KF8 format and one zipped up copy of your source files. When you submit to KDP, Amazon splits it up and delivers either the Mobi or the KF8 to their customers, depending on which device it's being downloaded to.
HTH