Extracting illustrations from commercial books

[shu246]

Have Kindle 3, about a month now; still learning. Loaded a bunch of public domain books. plus one purchased from Amazon.

Unless I missed some instruction, the Kindle just does not do illustrations well. For those books which have illustrations, there seems to be no way to zoom in and pan around.

OK, I can live with that for the free books. But it will be a severe limitation when it comes to buying books.

In particular, I was looking at "Crucible of War" on Amazon; a book about the 7 years war. Amazon offered a sample for download, which I took. The sample included what would have been a very useful and informative map; but not at the scale and resolution of the K3 screen.

If the maps and other illustrations could be extracted and viewed on a PC, that would be OK. The Amazon Kindle PC reader would not open the sample.

I dug into one of the free books, Capt' Bligh's "Voyage to the South Seas..." narration of the Bounty with the Amazon Kindle PC reader. The maps and drawings were marginally clearer than on the kindle, but still not legible; still not useful.

[FF2]

I purchased an ebook hiking guide for Glacier National Park. I debated returning it since, as you have noted, the maps are pretty poor and you cannot zoom/zoom/zoom to actually see detail and then pan around. I decided it was a worthy experiment in what the k3 is capable of and figured I could still read the descriptions and rely on other maps so I kept it. But I will not be buying any further books of that sort - not a complete waste of money but certainly not all that rewarding either.

I guess I should write a review and save others the trouble/hassle/waste.

[Tiersten]

Did you try to copy the sample from your Kindle to your PC? Or did you actually get it delivered to your PC direct?

[wallcraft]

You can "zoom" to full page images on the Kindle 3, from the user's guide:

Increasing the Size of a Picture
If you'd like to see a larger size of a picture or image you encounter in your reading material, simply follow these steps to zoom temporarily on the image.
1.Use the 5-way controller to position the cursor over the picture.
2.An image of a magnifying glass with a plus sign will appear on top of the picture.
3.Press the 5-way to zoom the image. You will see a expanded view of the picture that rotates if necessary to maximize the use of the display.
4.Press the 5-way (or any key or button, except the Home button) to return to your content.

There is no zoom and pan though.

There is no way to zoom in K4PC, and Nook 4 PC and the other ePub Windows apps seem to be the same (no zoom unless fit to page is encoded into the ebook). There is zoom in Windows MobiPocket Reader, which is still one of the best Windows Reading apps.

Images used to be tiny, because ebooks were read on PDAs. They got a bit bigger when the Kindle became popular, but Amazon is now charging (some) publishers per MB downloaded - so images are not likely to get bigger. In general, ePubs tend to have larger images than Kindle ebooks but no ePub Reader I am aware of has user controllable image handling of any kind.