Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I did some research recently that is relevant to this topic so I thought I would share it here.
I was reading on my Kindle Oasis a recently published book ( The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson) put out by a major publisher (Tor Books) and it contains a few maps at the beginning to add context to the story. I was disappointed that on my device the map images were of low resolution, barely readable even when zoomed in. The same maps in the Kindle app on my iPad were far clearer with much more detail.
On the Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android, and Kindle for iOS app this book downloads as a set of KFX files totaling 30,941KB in size. This closely matches the file size (30,982KB) listed on the amazon.com product page of the book. I do not know what kind of deal TOR has with Amazon, but for a KDP self publisher that size would determine the delivery cost of the book and affect the publisher's earnings. The same book delivered to my Kindle Oasis was only 3.57MB in size.
I looked at the first map (Elendel Basin) in the book. As far as I can tell that image was a good quality 783KB GIF image with dimensions of 1600x2493 pixels as delivered by the publisher to Amazon.
In the KFX files delivered to the Kindle apps that map is a 1.84MB JPEG file of 1232x1920 pixels. So the file has been converted to be more than twice as large but has lower resolution. And this larger file is included in the delivery cost of the book.
The same map delivered to my Kindle Oasis was a disappointing 74.4KB JPEG-XR with 441x687 pixels, a tiny fraction of the original image provided by the publisher. I can think of no valid reason for Amazon to reduce the image quality that severely. I would be angry if I was the publisher. |
Well, dang. We've all seen the folders, in unpacked mobis, with the higher-rez and lower-rez images, but...this sounds wild to me. I mean, why deliver such a low-rez version to the Oasis, of all places? The Oasis is higher-reaz, really, than many of the eInks, if memory serves. (Weren't most of the eInks at 169ppi and the Oasis was higher, or am I misremembering?)
That's really interesting, jhowell. I always assumed that yes, of course, different "versions" were being delivered, but I admit I never suspected that the image quality would be that enormously different. Never really looked hard, I guess.
Hitch