[gmw]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

JPEG compression artifacts in high-resolution covers. Argh!

I assume what you're talking about here is where they've taken a small image and tried to blow up to the minimum required by sites like Apple, rather than producing a new original image of the right size and compression. Most of the time I find the opposite, where the covers are high-res and saved at super high quality so the available quality far exceeds anything but the most detailed inspection. And sometimes these resource hogs are sitting on short stories!

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I would think that the EPUB standard would allow PNG covers, but I've yet to see one.

I've had far too many - PNG covers, and PNG internal images. PNG is great in the right situation, but too often it's used as just an inefficient way to present what should have been a JPEG saved at a quality appropriate to the content and intended use.

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

As a mystery reader, I'm hoping to one day solve the mystery of why I invariably go for the largest and highest resolution cover images I can find for epubs destined for my 8-inch eink reader.

Indeed. And then you get epubs with internal images* I have one that downloaded at 232MB and many in the 20MB to 90MB range. Most of these I've been able to drop the size down to something sane (like 10% of original size or even less) by a simple conversion to JPG and/or quality adjustment on the embedded images. And short of someone zooming in on an iPad or something, no one else is ever going to notice the difference. And these are mostly supposedly professionally produced for tradpub, you'd think they'd hire someone that knew what they were doing, but apparently they don't think epubs are worth that effort.


* And they have these hi-res images embedded in such a way that under normal epub display they show up as a half-inch square, or something equally ridiculous, so that unless you are using kepub or something you're never going to see it properly anyway.