Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
That's correct; Amazon does not use the included cover. However, I assume you're not distributing to iBooks, is that right? Because last time I looked--which was relatively recently, say, not more than a month ago--that size cover will fail at iBooks' intake (and, obviously, Smashwords as well, as their main claim to fame is iBooks distro).
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Yes, annoyingly, they have a maximum limit of 3.2 million pixels. I keep filing bugs complaining about it, and they did up it from 2 million, which was ridiculously small, but even 3.2 million is nowhere near sufficient.
Since the original iPad, the maximum native display size for iBooks has gone up by about a factor of 8, while the allowed pixel count has gone up by only a factor of 1.6. That's kind of bad.
- iPad (early): 1024 x 768
- iMac (current): 5120 x 2880
So if you show an image in 4:3 aspect ratio on the iMac in full-screen mode, it is 2160 x 2880 pixels. That's over 6.2 megapixels—roughly double what Apple allows—just to have an image that doesn't have to be scaled
up to fit the screen.
When that first iPad came out, the allowed size for a 4:3 image was about 1224 x 1632, or about 1.6x the resolution in either direction. To get that level of extra resolution with an iMac, the resolution would be 3456 x 4608, which is about 16 megapixels. Apple still allows only 3.2 megapixels.
If you happen to be viewing a book that's in landscape orientation, the numbers get even more laughable. 3840 x 2880 is the minimum resolution without scaling, or 11 megapixels. If you want 1.6x that size, it is over 28 megapixels.
So Apple's megapixel count has failed to keep up with hardware resolution increases by an entire
order of magnitude. Not that anybody in his or her right mind is going to produce content at that resolution if they can help it, mind you, but the fact that Apple doesn't even give us the
option of producing higher-quality content for desktop delivery is just plain lame.
I understand Apple's desire to limit the size of images for bandwidth reasons, but arbitrary megapixel counts are just plain silly. Instead, Apple should require that images with higher resolution be properly configured to use media queries so that devices with lower resolution load the lower-resolution versions for memory purposes (an original iPad would explode with a 6 MP image, much less a 28 MP image), and so that devices with higher resolution load the higher-resolution versions. That way, publishers could maintain compatibility with older devices, while still maintaining the ability to grow their images for maximum quality on higher-resolution hardware.