Quote:
Originally Posted by Joefish
That's absolutely maddening. So even though Amazon suggest using massive images to cater for newer kindle devices, the official tool for creating mobi files borks images for older Kindle readers. Nifty!
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Apparently, KindleGen does support larger images, but only for fixed layout books. For details, see this
blog post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joefish
I wonder if just uploading an epub2 to KDP and letting them handle the conversion achieves better results? I'm guessing not.
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AFAIK, they also use KindleGen with some undocumented parameters. At least if you upload a KindleGen generated .mobi file (or an ePub file), KDP will have your original image source files. (KindleGen will attach the epub source files to the .mobi file, unless you use the
-dont_append_source parameter.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joefish
What's even better, a test image I included in the book that was 40KB seems to have been left alone - the image size remains the same. However, It's obviously still doing something with it as it looks just as blocky as the other images.
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The converter might have problems with the image type that you're using. Can you post a typical image file and the resized file that you get when you unpack the .mobi file?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joefish
KindleUnpack produces a folder called HDImages that contains my unmolested images. I'm guessing that on newer Kindle devices like the Fire my images at least look acceptable? Or is that just wishful thinking?
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I know that someone mentioned this folder in this subforum, but I'm a bit fuzzy about the details. I'm sure one of our resident Kindle/KDP experts will chime in on this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joefish
So basically my options are:
Use KindleGen and accept the fact my images will look rubbish on older e-ink readers and potentially newer kindle devices.
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IMHO, a better solution would be to experiment with different image formats and conversion settings. If you resize all images down to about 80KB with an acceptable quality, KindleGen
might leave them alone.