[graycyn]

Originally Posted by DSpider

You never know what resolution e-readers 5 years from now will have. Maybe this 600x800 stuff will be considered "SD" in the future, like the 720x480 that DVDs have vs 1920x1080. So you should think about adding a bigger picture than the standard 600x800 res, even if it may take 0.8 extra seconds to display on first gen devices. If it's in black and white you may consider turning it into a vector image.

You could be right. In fact, I'm sure you are! But I also need an old Nook to handle this, since one reason I am making the book is to share with a nephew. So I don't want to go too overboard. I can always do another later with larger images.

Last night I had my Sony 350 freeze on me when I loaded the book with the larger images. It wouldn't open the book at all, and I got a "file invalid" message, even though the same file was working fine on hubby's T-1. I'm not 100% sure it was the larger images that caused this, but I couldn't think what else would have.

I was wondering if it was because one of the chapters that has a spread image also has a chapter head and ending image. Because these were black and white and I couldn't see much difference, I downgraded to a 32 shades of grey PNG instead of the 64 I had been using. That seems to have worked, as the file now fuctions fine on the Sony again.

Hubby's T-1 handled the slightly higher quality and larger filesize images fine in that chapter though. I was using 768x1024 sized images for the spreads. That works well even if you take half the image and zoom it until it fills the screen. And it also worked well in landscape. And should work nicely on 7" reader tablets.

Some are opposed to using vector images (probably because of some older devices with dated firmwares which may or may not support it properly), but I think that it's clearly a better choice. They take up less space, support large zoom levels. What's not to like?

I'm not opposed, I have no idea how to convert my scanned images to vector. Does it require special software?

It probably won't work on you since you're the one who edited the image and saw the extra details. But on someone who never read the paperback version (or read it some time ago), chances are very high that they even won't notice.

Having looked at the spread image on a 6" screen, it's not too bad. With the larger image inside the file, there's now a good option to have it display quite nicely in landscape orientation. So I think for now I am good. For the future, well, that's much less certain, but I will of course retain all my master images, from which I can produce larger images I could drop back into the epub at a later time without much problem.

I'm pretty new to rolling my own epubs, so thanks for the advice!