What size do most of you set your images at for ebooks?
I normally work based on the width of an image. If the image looks good at lower resolutions, I make it 600px wide at 72dpi.
Some images that I want to have blur less, I make 800px wide or even 1200px wide, depending on where it is used.
Due to many years of experience, I used to be confident in how my images would appear. Now, due to some recent reading and perhaps a change of devices out there, I am far less confident. The research I have done online, is VERY conflicting to say the least. Some stores and forums say that all images should be at least 1200px wide at 300dpi. I feel this is excessive, especially when there are many images in the book. Some of my books have over 400 images in them. I did a test for an image of 1200px x 900px at 300dpi. A jpeg would be about 250kb. If I had to use this as an average, a book with 400 images in them would be 400 x 250kb = 100mb for an ebook! Some would argue that a book of this nature should be fixed layout. The problem with fixed layout is that most stores do not accept them these days. It also means that text inside the book are rasterized and will pixelate when zooming in. The text will also not be scalable or interactive.
According to Amazon:
Kindle Create provides support for inserting, resizing, and deleting images. You can edit the size and alignment of your images with options based on professional book layouts. Kindle Create requires images in the JPG or PNG format and recommends at least 100 pixels on the longest side and 300 pixels per inch to ensure image clarity on Kindle HDX devices. Images inside a paragraph (inline images) can't be edited, but you can delete those images in the source and then insert them in Kindle Create.
I have compared to my books to some of my competitors. At least one best selling author is using the same approach. None of his images exceed 600px wide at 72 dpi. In fact, some of his images are even smaller. I am assuming he is catering for the typical ebook audience as well as to lower his delivery fees.
I always looked at my images on a couple of devices as well as test them in photoshop, kindle previewers, Calibre and Kindle for PC. I had a very "web-approach" as opposed to a "print-approach".
I guess it leads to the question if one should design ebooks for specific devices in mind. If readers are buying on Amazon, are they reading on kindle for PC, or on their phone? I am sure ebooks that has 1200px images inside them is less than ideal? And not everyone has a Kindle Fire HD. I am unsure how images of 600px wide will appear on HD devices. Will they scale (but blur) or will they appear too small on the screen?
I would appreciate your help!
Image px sizes and resolution for the general eBook audience?
Stan123: We do lots of non-fiction w/many images. Yes...you are right the advice on this topic is either old or wrong. Realistically Amazon's recomendations are ridiculous for the reasons that a) If larger than 600px wide on a Kindle Fire or Paperwhite it will get downsized by their processing to those specs. Only if a viewer clicks on it will the full size appear.
b) too large or too high dpi images greatly swell your download size meaning a bigger 'download fee' out of your profits if you want to sell at the 70% royalty price points. Don't get me started on why Amazon still charges this B.S.-fee, it was supposed to be to just to support the 2G data access for how old school Kindle's could download books via cellular.
We use 600-700 wide max, at 96 dpi to keep our file sizes reasonable. Irfanview is our go-to tool to do batch conversions of higher resolution/larger images to Kindle specs. Also for finetuning individual images too, if you get an older copy (4.33 or earlier) that has the "Save for Web" feature which uses the RIOT optimizer Plug-In. It is the bomb for dialling down an image file size and giving you a before/after realtime view of the compression artifacting. This way you can judge by eye how far you can go without loss of quality.
Go bigger if you need to (i.e. for full screen stuff or that which has small text); iPads/iPhone/Nook/newer color Kobo devices have higher dpi density so larger images will look better, and they do not charge you extra for the 'download size' fees like amazon does.
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