[Hitch]

Originally Posted by impasto

Thanks for the new comments.
I'm a bit hesitant if I should be replying to some of the comments. I noticed some people are quite passionate to convince others, and I don't want you to think I'm an ungrateful listener. So please treat my responses as FYI. I don't have any intention of changing your minds. I'm just explaining my rationale.

I'm not passionate to "convince you." It's your time to waste or spend and your book.

What car is better: subaru wrx or corvette? There is no right or wrong here. Subaru is better in rally driving, but corvette is better in road racing. To me it's similar with fixed layout and reflowing. The former is better for image heavy ebooks, and the latter for text or text with occasional images.

No...sorry, I disagree. Fixed layout is ALWAYS the format of last resort. The limitations and inherent reader disagreeableness is always a problem. Does FXL solve some problems? Yes, sure. But it creates many more. Depending on what happens when KDP processes your file in the PW--the Publishing Workflow--which is something that you CANNOT pre-test or sandbox, you may find out that the way the comic works is different than you are expecting. You keep assuming that what you're seeing, now, is how it will work, when on-sale,but when KDP encounters that FXL metadata, other things will occur.

You have a book that is entirely images. In your circumstance, sure...perhaps FXL is the 'best" route. We just made 4 books for someone, with comic panels, one to a page and I would never have cut him off from the entire eInk reading market by making that set of ebooks in FXL.

When you open (on a small-screen device) a comic-like ebook formatted as reflowable, you'll have to use zoom a lot. Unfortunately, first you have to double-click the image. When you want to go to the next page, first you have to close the image that you had open on the screen. It's just clumsy, and not too pleasant if you have to do it with every page. The reading experience for comic-like ebooks is much nicer with fixed layout: pinch zoom works immediately, and turning pages works without any issues. Try it if you don't believe me.

Perhaps I should introduce myself--I own an eBook company that's made more than 6,000 ebooks and I'm quite familiar with how they work.

Yes, I'm well aware that you have to tap-zoom images in reflowable ebooks--but on the other hand, it would gain you easy entrance to the literally millions of eInks. To me, that's a pretty no-brainer trade-off, but hey, it's your book.

The other problem is, you're entirely focused, as I suspected on PHONES. I mean...there's an entire Kindleverse of devices out there, aside from Phones, which are the very smallest of "Kindle" screens. (My operating assumption is that you haven't coded this to operate in panel view, as you apparently only have one image/panel per page.) So, yes, you eliminate a keystroke, the tap prior to the zoom and the tap to close it.

(For reference, for those who don't work in these formats, Amazon's own Kindle Comic Creator and Kindle Kids' Book Creator, which enable panel view, do NOT allow further panel zooming or page-based pinch-zooming.)

There is another reason, which might be due my lack of experience: I'm unable to get rid of wide white margins. Real estate on a phone screen is precious. I tried a few things, including negative margins, resets in css,
and <meta content="true" name="zero-margin"/> in content.opf
So far no luck when I display it on my phone.

You're probably not going to be able to do that, because you're not setting a background image size and resolution, as one does with panel view. All you're doing is putting an image INTO an empty background--so there isn't anything that creates the "full bleed effect" that you're seeking, if you see what I mean.

That's how I did it. I also read somewhere that this is a preferred method as readers don't need to load the entire book at once, just one html file (i.e. one page) at a time. It's faster. I use this method in both layout options of my test ebook.

It is faster. In a regular book, you'd do sections or chapters, not every page, but...{shrug}.

Totally happy to read this! Extremely important.

Well, if you cut yourself off from the eInks, you're going to need it.

I'll try to find it.

You can if you want, (It's here under the Comparison Chart: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202101750 ) but honestly...it's worthless. I just had a go-round with Amazon about this, because I had a furious customer that felt I'd "misled" him about where FXL could be read. Amazon itself told him that the book we made for him was coded perfectly and they also told him that the section in the HELP pages was outdated, but...he was still adamant that I had some obligation to tell him that their chart was wrong--a chart I never knew he'd consulted and I had WARNED him that FXL couldn't be read on all devices. See where it says that FXL without popups can be read on eInks? Yeah, nope.

Do you share these results? A link? That would be super informative to read.

No; I'm a commercial bookmaker, not a pollster. While I share a lot of stuff here and on other forums that I've garnered in my travels, proprietary information or coding techniques, for example, that I've paid to develop, (like perfect dropcaps for all forms of Kindle) I keep to myself.

Hitch