Pictures on the Kindle (Ver. 1.3)
Aaron Shepard
Language: English
Pages: 86
ISBN: B01MXI9LSI
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
******#1 AMAZON BESTSELLER IN PUBLISHING & BOOKS (JULY 2013)******
*********#1 AMAZON BESTSELLER IN BOOK DESIGN (NOV. 2013)*********
**********************CURRENT VERSION: 1.3***********************
Almost everything you've read about formatting pictures for Kindle is wrong. The advice offered by Kindle experts and even Amazon itself can give images that are tiny, blocky, noisy, or wildly inconsistent on different Kindles.
Aaron Shepard, author of acclaimed books on Kindle and POD publishing, brings years of experience in book design, webmastering, and photography to bear on a single question: How do you make pictures look great on the Kindle? He answers that question, while also providing beginners a basic course in picture editing.
Along the way, he discusses how to keep Microsoft Word from sneakily degrading your pictures; how to adjust HTML code to show images at their best; how to make part of a picture transparent for Night and Sepia modes; how to boost the power of your cover image as a marketing tool; and how to create anything from children's books to photography books to poetry books within minutes with the Kindle Comic Creator.
Best of all, you don't have to take his word for any of it. The proof is right in the book, with samples of many kinds of pictures you might use -- photos, paintings, drawings, diagrams, tables, screenshots, cover images, and more.
Nowhere else will you find such in-depth info on working with Kindle graphics. Whatever you use to create Kindle books -- Word, InDesign, a dedicated ebook app, or straight HTML -- you'll find "Pictures on Kindle" a perfect companion to other formatting guides.
From the author:
To work with pictures, you'll need a photo editor like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CS, Corel PaintShop Pro, or Gimp. For Kindle-only publishing, Photoshop Elements should do fine. Besides having everything you're likely to need for Kindle pictures, it maintains the legendary quality of the Photoshop brand, is far less intimidating than its parent program, and is very reasonably priced. You can also find lots of help for it.
For publishing that includes print, Photoshop CS -- Creative Suite -- is no doubt the most capable program you can find. That's what I use myself and what I feature most in this book. But it's also true that the current version is meant to be the last, and Adobe's continuing support of it is uncertain. You might consider instead its designated replacement, Photoshop CC -- Creative Cloud. But you may find it uneconomical or unwise to depend on software available by subscription only.
Though most of the screenshots in this book are taken from Photoshop CS, you'll usually find a similar dialog box in the Expert mode of Photoshop Elements. When I talk about Photoshop without distinguishing the version, I'm talking about both CS and Elements. The specific versions I'm discussing are Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop Elements 11.
In writing this book, I've tried to assume that you know little or nothing about dealing with pictures. So, I start by explaining basic properties like format, resolution, and color mode, and then provide a basic course in picture editing. I also give tips on getting the best results from your camera or scanner.
Many of you will want to include pictures in Kindle books that you compose in Microsoft Word. That may well be the most treacherous program you could use for this purpose -- but I'll show you how to do it safely and keep Word from degrading your pictures. (To make sure I got it right, I composed this book in Word.)
Kindle books are built from HTML -- the common language of Web pages and ebooks -- along with its companion language, CSS. This code provides instructions that help define how pictures in your Kindle book are displayed. So, for those of you with suitable software, workflow, and skills, I'll also give tips on how to optimize your code for pictures on Kindle.
My focus here is on pictures used to illustrate a book with flowing text -- text that adjusts its layout to different screens and also to different font sizes, margins, or spacing chosen by the user. But Amazon offers another kind of book as well: fixed format. In this kind, each page has a static layout and is simply reduced or enlarged to fit the screen.
Though there are disadvantages to fixed format, it may in some ways be the better choice for books featuring pictures more than text. So, toward the end of this book, I discuss a couple of specialized programs you can use to produce Kindle books of this kind, including the promising new Kindle Comic Creator. It's not just for comics!
Other topics of special interest include tables, screenshots, transparency, children's books, poetry, cover images, and how to submit your picture files to Amazon KDP.
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Aaron Shepard is a foremost proponent of the new business of profitable self publishing, which he has practiced and helped develop since 1998. He is the author of "Aiming at Amazon," "POD for Profit," "Perfect Pages," and "From Word to Kindle," Amazon's #1 bestselling paid book on Kindle formatting.
they would have forced the text to display smaller. You’ll note, though, I cropped to retain the original 2:3 ratio—and you’ll remember that this is the ratio I gave earlier as the best compromise for filling Kindle displays. Since the book’s illustrations had originally been laid out to bleed off the 6 × 9 page, I scaled these down within InDesign to fit the new width. I also made sure each page could stand alone, so it would never be necessary to view two at a time at a smaller size. All my
returning to the Print dialog, you should see your new page size in effect with scaling already set up. Then just use the PDF button/menu to Save as PDF. By the way, this scaling trick also works in reverse, as I discovered with my book of poetry Songs of Flesh, Songs of Spirit. Converting from a print edition, I wound up with 12-point type on landscape pages of 5.25 × 3.75 inches. To raise the eventual pixel count, I scaled these up in Preview to a page size of 7 × 5. • The Kindle Paperwhite
are surprisingly accurate—at least for books with flowing text—they still display your pictures on a monitor with a different resolution and different color properties. So, the emulations can never look exactly like the real thing. Obviously, buying a collection of Kindles is a significant expense, but not as great as it used to be, and for serious publishing, you may find it worthwhile. My own collection currently includes four: a basic e-ink Kindle, a Kindle Paperwhite, the smaller Kindle Fire
some settings I recommend for reflective art—in other words, for anything but negatives and transparencies. • I’ll be talking a lot more about resolution and sizing, so you’ll get a better idea of what you need as a scanning resolution. In general, though, you’ll judge this resolution based on how much you need to enlarge the picture. If your photo or painting is full-size—that is, around 8 × 10 inches, or 8.5 × 11—and if it doesn’t require a lot of cropping, then a resolution of 300 ppi (or
dpi) should be enough. If the picture is much smaller or needs much cropping, you might want to go to 600 or even higher. Line drawings need higher resolution to keep their lines smooth, so you might scan those at up to 1200. Note that a scanner’s optimal resolutions usually fall in a pattern of halves—typically 1200, 600, 300, 150, 75—based on the scanner hardware. You’ll get better results if you stick to these resolutions. And don’t bother with ultra-high resolutions generated by incremental