Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
Good to have your company, Jules. Do you see a difference between ebook and paperback/hardback cover work? My own indie house over the past year or so has tended to have covers designed that we feel are as effective in black and white for e-ink readers as on paper or on LED colour devices (including PCs and laptops as well as colour tablets), but I can see no obvious sign of any other house taking the need for b/w compatibility into account. Interesting point. Best wishes. Neil
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Converting illustrated books to ebook format (other than PDF) involves so many design compromises that it's really like creating a whole new design. So far, I'm only working in the Kindle format, which eliminates most typographic refinements, including the choice of fonts, and only supports inline layout. It reminds me of early HTML.
I change all the InDesign heading styles to the Heading 1, Heading 2, etc., and then export to RTF, edit and save as Word HTML and then clean up in Dreamweaver to remove the Word HTML formatting. Once this is done, I insert the images in Dreamweaver, and create the Kindle file in Mobipocket Creator.
I'm converting my images to 16 gray scale PNGs. Some of them work out just fine. Others need considerable work in Photoshop, including various "artistic" filters and/or half-tone screens. I also have experimented with Mangle.exe, which does beautiful PNG conversions, especially when combined with Photoshop editing. I assume that since Kindle is so utterly basic, it will provide a proper foundation for conversion to ePub and other formats.
From what I've seen in my online research comic-book format graphic novels seem to be converting well. Graphic designers are complaining about the glitches (many, very frustrating) and constraints. The non-PDF ebook is not a visually friendly environment, which is unfortunate, as it would be the least expensive way to distribute full-color graphically rich works.