My wife is about to self publish an eBook. It contains 60+ photos - mainly people and medical equipment. Most are 1200px wide and under 160KB in size.
I've so far built the epub file and everything looks good. I'm now trying to convert the epub to mobi format so we can sell it on the kindle store.
I initially tried using KindleGen as I read this was the best way to do it. I used kindleGens no compression mode - i.e. C:\KindleGen\kindlegen.exe -c0 C:\KindleGen\Book\my_ebook.epub.
After testing the mobi file it outputs on an older style e-ink Kindle reader (4th gen with the cursor pad), I discovered the images were very 'blocky' - backgrounds and skin textures are pixelated (Minecraft-style) or really blurry.
If you zoom in on the image, the quality seems to improve slightly. I've tried setting the image sizes (via html) to pixels and percentages and have also left the size attribute out. I still get blocky images. I tried reformatting the actual image files down to 400px wide to help avoid any resizing problems and again no improvement.
I then tried to use Calibre to do the conversion. And it improved things dramatically. No more blocky backgrounds or people!
So now I'm left wondering:
- Why does the KindleGen output such poor quality images even with compression turned off?
- Can I submit the mobi file Calibre made to the Kindle store, and if so, are there any problems/limitations I need to know about?
- How do professional publishers go about creating image-rich mobi files for the Kindle store?
