Current Kindle delivery of PNGs/GIFs

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Does anyone know how PNGs and GIFs in epubs uploaded to KDP are currently delivered to people's e-ink kindles and other kindle apps? In the venerable "PNG in KF8 yet?" thread, j.p.s said this in 2023:

It has been well known for years that amazon reduces image resolution and quality and converts PNG and GIF to JPEG for books delivered to or for eink devices. Where have you been? Nothing has changed or looks likely to change anytime soon.

Well, last year Amazon updated the Kindle Publishing Guidelines, and in section 10.4.6 they finally updated the line art image type guidance from GIF (in the 2019 guidelines and earlier) to PNG.

For years, we have been using palette-reduced indexed color PNGs in our epubs intended for other platforms, and GIF versions of those PNGs in our epubs intended for KDP. Is that still a useful step, or will Amazon deliver the PNG versions (which can be smaller than the GIFs) to customers? Has anything changed since 2023?

[j.p.s]

I owe an update to jhowell's thread Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=371082
but I bought a few books eligible for EPUB download from amazon and compared those to the KF8.

GIFs are now passed through, but they get reduced in dimension if over around 128KB in size.

I've forgotten what happens to PNG, but I think it gets converted to JPEG. I'll try to make providing a detailed update to the above thread a higher priority, but it will probably be a while.

I think you had a hand in the production of a couple of books that I bought.

[j.p.s]

I forgot to write that it looks like image files get supplied unchanged in the EPUB (only the publisher would know), it is the azw3 that they are changed in.

The HTML in the EPUB is likely different than that supplied by the publisher.

Also the EPUB lacks the creator (author) tag, yet author metadata is in the azw3.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

I've made most of Dragonsteel's ebooks, but now I have a couple other people in my department who can do it. Still, we're getting really tired of KDP's delivery fees, and we've decided to make our Kindle images a lot smaller and add a QR code pointing to the full resolution on the website. Anyway, if you tell me which Dragonsteel books you tested downloads for, I could tell you what formats our originally submitted images were in.

Do I understand correctly that Amazon's epub delivery is limited to the drm-free download links, and Kindle apps and devices still use azw3 etc.?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Peter Ahlstrom

I've made most of Dragonsteel's ebooks, but now I have a couple other people in my department who can do it. Still, we're getting really tired of KDP's delivery fees, and we've decided to make our Kindle images a lot smaller and add a QR code pointing to the full resolution on the website. Anyway, if you tell me which Dragonsteel books you tested downloads for, I could tell you what formats our originally submitted images were in.

Do I understand correctly that Amazon's epub delivery is limited to the drm-free download links, and Kindle apps and devices still use azw3 etc.?

If you make the images smaller, you will screw your customers if you are allowing epUb to be downloaded. When the ePub is downloaded, the images in the ePub are full resolution and color if the images are on color. If you have the images smaller at the start, they will be that way in the ePub.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Ah, but if they download the ePub, then they can drop in the higher resolution images from the website! Problems solved!