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Hi Doitsu, thanks for another awesome reply.
Scots blog was a great read. Although my wife's book in non-fiction, I'd rather it wasn't fixed width. I'm a web designer by trade, so the thought of a non-responsive book makes me shudder. It's bad enough I'm having to deal with a proprietary file format!
I went ahead and uploaded the epub to KDP to see how their conversion handled the photos. As you hinted, the mobi they produced had the same overly compressed images. I guess their KindleGen is equally cr*p!
The photos are just standard JPEG, edited in Photoshop. Compiling the mobi with low-res images just to make it look OK in old e-ink Kindle readers would suck. It would effectively force others with newer devices or the Kindle App to also have a low-res experience.
I just noticed that any mobi file produced with the KindleGen is subject to a very restrictive terms of use - specifically, you can't sell the mobi file it produces outside of Amazon. Needless to say, we'll also be selling the book on our own website so this is yet another problem I wasn't expecting.
On a positive note, the mobi file produced by Calibre did upload to KDP without being rejected. When I downloaded the resulting file, it hadn't compressed the images. Yippee! The only curious thing was when I unpacked it using the KindleUnpack plugin - it contained the mobi7 folder and the HDImages folder but no mobi8 folder. Not sure why.
Given the restrictive nature of KindleGens terms of use, I think I'll persevere with Calibre. I should be ready to publish the book in the next week or two. When I do, I'll let you know how I get on.
Once again, thank you for all your sage guidance. You're a legend (and a wizard!)
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