Quote:
Originally Posted by ecbritz
I would like to design and create my own ebook cover, based on an image edited to serve as book cover. What should the size and height/width ratio be of the image on which I base the design?
Most ebooks seem to have more or less the same dimensions (height/width ratio). Because they are zoomed in and out, as it were, in accordance with the size of the screen on which they are displayed, a certain image resolution is probably also preferable and important. So what should the size, height/width ratio and resolution be of an image ideally suited to serve as basis of an ebook cover design?
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When it introduced the Fire in the fall of 2011, Amazon began to recommend a skinny ratio, so as to fill the Fire screen. I obeyed, but then realized that the product image looked too small on the Amazon store page, where the basic image is 500 pixels tall (and however wide). So I reverted to the 6x9 ratio that I use for print editions. Really--who cares whether the cover fills the Fire screen vertically?
Amazon and B&N like to have a product image in the range of 1000-2000 pixels on the long side, so I have settled on 1200x1800 as suitable for both. (I have to shrink it for Apple, via Lulu.)
It used to be that the KDP conversion on Amazon suppressed the included cover, if there was one, but this is no longer true, at least in the case of epubs uploaded to the KDP. My last two books ended with two covers in the Kindle edition, until I deleted the included cover and made a KDP-specific epub.
I do include a cover in the epub that goes to B&N, Apple, and Kobo. Because of the high-rez screen on the modern tablets, I have been moving to a 900x1200 pixel jpeg for the included covers. I don't have an iPad or a Nook HD (if there is such a thing), so I don't know how they treat images. But the Fire HD and in particular the 8.9 inch Fire render images in absolute pixel size, instead of zooming them as the older Kindles did, so this larger included image seems a cheap hedge against having my cover look too small.
(For interior images, I use a width=95% instruction to avoid their looking shrunken on the tablets.)