Quote:
Originally Posted by blue_skies
I totally agree! I used to often try to read my Amazon purchased ebooks on my computer using the Kindle app, and the images were so ridiculously tiny and low resolution they were worthless. It was especially frustrating for non-fiction books like those with fashion illustrations or interior design photos... with teeny-tiny photos. I could never understand why they didn't just use nice high resolution photos.
I made up a couple of books for my own use and always used the largest photos I could, and they never failed to display on my Kindle Keyboard. I'm not sure what the difference is in the case where a previous poster here said large photos won't display on Kindle devices. Maybe they were way bigger than the large photos I was using. Still, no reason to use poor quality. Fix the eReader software instead!
Publishers and developers really need to fix this.
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Were you using black and white photos? Those did okay when I uploaded pictures/illustrations for each story in Tracking Magic. But at the time, there were actual specs for what sizes I could load--right before the first Fire came out. A couple of the images started out full 256 color and those I had to switch to 200 and size accordingly. The specs are different now than then, but for Send to Kindle, they're about the same as back then. Some of it could have to do with whether or not the entire file reaches a certain size--for example, if I sell a book that is very large, Amazon has a section that basically says I can't charge less than x and I'm paying for the transfer to each reader. (I don't know the size off the top of my head, but I do know at least one writer who hit that and part of the reason was images). I'm sure the rules are different for large publishers, but the mechanisms aren't perfect--and they are ever changing as new devices come out.
I recently worked on a book (I edit on the side) and that book would have been extra lovely with a small graphic at the top of each chapter head. Problem: Makes the book larger, have to fuss to make sure it doesn't break anything, have to make sure it doesn't cause any resolution problems anywhere and so on. That means: Extra cost in time and dollars for the author.
Now, if an author chooses to do a map that is important to a particular story, said author is going to have to take that into account when working on the upload or paying someone to do it. A full color hand drawn illustration could cause some issues. I think the problem is that the area of color/illustrations/images is still fluctuating (rules, and so on). There are some specs for authors, but getting an image to FIT the so-called specs requires deciding whether to go black/white, make the image smaller, do grayscale and so on.