ebook.com preview is mangled.

[roland1]

I had one cover version that was entirely orange with white text, but CMYK does a crappy job of printing a decent orange, so I looked elsewhere. However, that was my favorite one until I started working with the blue design.

But if you're saying that some people will only ever see it in greyscale because of their readers, well then...I'm off the hook.

[DNSB]

Just to the heck of it, I converted the cover image to GS and displayed it on my Kobo Sage along with the original colour version. Personally, I did not find that much difference in readability between the two versions. Sadly I couldn' do this using screenshots since the screenshot on a Kobo is in colour.

[roland1]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Just to the heck of it, I converted the cover image to GS and displayed it on my Kobo Sage along with the original colour version. Personally, I did not find that much difference in readability between the two versions. Sadly I couldn' do this using screenshots since the screenshot on a Kobo is in colour.

Attachment 193076Attachment 193075

As I was working on the blue design, my objective was to make the word "JOY" stand out most. I knew I was sacrificing the brightness of the "Clearing a Path to..." text to get a shining effect for "Joy."

This cover has gone in a number of directions during my design experiments, including this little orange number from early 2021 (below). But the style of the lettering was already set years ago and I ultimately chose to stick with that.

(P.S. Great that we're talking about this aspect of booking, too. So much info flying around - including the greyscale situation; it's all good to know.)

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by roland1

(P.S. Great that we're talking about this aspect of booking, too. So much info flying around - including the greyscale situation; it's all good to know.)

One of the reasons I like testing on at least a couple of eInk devices is to see what the covers and other images look like plus any use of coloured text within the ebook.

One cover a few years back still stands out in my memory for becoming pretty much a solid grey when displayed on a Kindle Paperwhite and very slightly better on a Kobo Aura One.

[roland1]

Are there any "simulator" apps that mimic viewing on various kinds of devices, kind of like the "soft proof" feature in graphic apps?

The Kindle previewer was kind to my ebook; I used that as the "in a perfect world, it would always look like this" kind of test.

Just curious because I'm not a handheld device kinda guy, so there's not much I can check it on without accosting people in public "Hey, do you mind if I...?".

I have tons of music gear though—guitars n' stuff. That's where all my money went. I also realized as a musician that I would need some other profession to fall back on. That's why I became an author.

[phillipgessert]

Kindle Previewer and ADE will get you far. ADE is quite picky, and thus pretty good for finding big fails. Keeping your styling simple will go farther in terms of peace of mind.

[roland1]

Is ADE 3.0 better to use, or the older 2.xx version? I downloaded them both last week and used 2.xx. to run a test on my ebook.

[phillipgessert]

Mine is 4.5, but the reason JSWolf gave earlier about rolling with the older version seems to make sense to me. Basically that it's more unforgiving.

[roland1]

I can live with that.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by phillipgessert

Mine is 4.5, but the reason JSWolf gave earlier about rolling with the older version seems to make sense to me. Basically that it's more unforgiving.

We use both for testing, for this reason. Along with hard devices, too, of course, but I admit, it can become tedious, putting however-many eBooks on devices each day. For those for which we don't expect problems, ADE 2.x and 4.5 are pretty adequate.

Hitch

[roland1]

Just installed 4.5 too. No stopping me now.

(P.S. DNSB: Your caterpillar appears to have found my book.)

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by roland1

Just installed 4.5 too. No stopping me now.

(P.S. DNSB: Your caterpillar appears to have found my book.)

To be honest, I wasn't that interested in your book so I created an empty book in calibre with the title and author and then did a metadata download to get the metadata and cover image.

I tend to use that technique a lot with library loans so I have a record in calibre of reading stats, etc.

[roland1]

It's all about the stats. Speaking of which, major publishers claim that only 18% of people who buy a book actually read it through to the end.

That's actually pretty sad if you apply that stat to medical books on brain surgery, or instructions on how to fly a Boeing 737-Max.

I'm sure it applies more for people who just buy something popular on a whim.

So yeah, it makes me wonder whether people who buy my book have the endurance to read it through to the end. It's definitely not a light read. Guess I'll know more about that someday as well.

[roland1]

I'm just formatting the css for my new ebook today — before I fix the old one, which I hope to get to in a few days.

I mention this because I'm using the advice given to me here by Hitch, JSWolf and others. I'm using a style sheet based on the input of others and then will apply those lessons learned to the previous book (the one that began this topic).

My question today is about left and right margins. I'm getting the msg that I should avoid adding any kind of space on the left or right for the body text to breath. Is that right?

I can see in the various reader previews that this is not an issue. But is that across the board —*do all readers add their own l/r margins?

P.S. Hitch, I'm using your p padding advice and adding a 0.2 em space between paragraphs. It does look less crowded that way—although in the print version there is no p space and it looks just fine...(mind you, it also has a good line height and that seems to help it look less cluttered).

[Turtle91]

I wouldn’t add any space to left and right margins unless you are going for some kind of ‘block text’ look. It just wastes real estate. Most readers/apps can control their own margin size so anything you put in there can just get overridden.