[graycyn]

Originally Posted by DSpider

I'm a fan of replicating the book as accurately as possible, in PDF form. So I would try to scan the illustration as "complete" as possible - because let me tell you, it's a little tricky using a flatbed scanner to get a good shot between the pages.

Whoops, forgot to mention the book I am making is ePub. Actually, I use a handheld wand scanner, and the margins were good enough that I was easily able to get a nice scan of each page.

Also, it depends very much on the illustration. If it's something simple with most of the details in the middle of the page and a simple colour or colour gradient at the edges, I could just fill it in and none will be the wiser. But if it's a photo or something, I would probably have to crop it so it doesn't look blurred at one edge. But I don't know... I haven't really come across any book with edge-to-edge photos before.

Black and white illustration, lots of detail, but otherwise not a bad sort of illustration to reproduce.

If it's an ePub or Mobi we're talking about here, you could probably get away with hacking both parts together - again, depending very much on the illustration. For instance, most people look at the middle of an image first. So they'll easily spot a big tear right in the middle (or a blur, whatever). Both images would have to line up pretty well.

That's more or less what I did. It's fairly obvious still that it's a two page spread, but the images line up and lead into one another. It really looks no different joined into one image than it does in the print spread, because as mentioned, there are decent margins.

Alternatively, place one half on one page, crop out the bad part, and when they switch to the next page their minds will automatically fill in the gap. Experiment with this a little. Because it really doesn't matter if 80 px are missing on each side. Crop each half to 600x800 and they won't care. Heck, they probably won't even notice, unless they have the paperback with them and thoroughly check it for details. But I bet the written stuff is much much more important than one illustration. It is a book, after all.

I thought about this and I may try editing the ePub to try this out and just see how easily my mind fills the gap.

I tried one with putting a large image (that must have the reader be turned horizontally to view) at the end of the chapter, and honestly, not really liking that approach. It feels disruptive. Further, the image is still small enough that while detail is better, it's just not that huge a difference from having the small version in the vertical text flow.

Correct about the written stuff, but the illustrations are by a well-known artist and really are wonderful.