I'm looking for some advice on image sizes for donated books. I'm also thinking of submitting a corrected version of a book I recently submitted and I could use some guidance on that too.
I have been using RST for all my submissions, and my latest submission was this one:
This is my first attempt at an RST book with illustrations. I think the web page turned out pretty well, but when you read the book on a Kindle it is a different story. The illustrations are all 300 DPI and other than some rotation and cleaning up are the same size as was in the original PDF from Google Books. I specified that the illustrations should be displayed at 50% of the screen width, which looks nice in a web page but like postage stamps in the Kindle. The other thing I'm concerned about is the amount of disk space the image files take up. I'm thinking I would have been better off to display the pictures at 75% width or higher, and to use a Linux utility called "mogrify" to do a bulk resize on them to get the disk space usage down.
I've got another book in the pipeline:
This is a terrific book from 1918 called Aeroplane Construction and Operation. It is lavishly illustrated with photos and diagrams, and those images are a significant part of the value of the book.
Having said that, the zipped up RST + image files is a hefty 98 mb. You can side load something that size into a Kindle or Nook, but you can't email it.
I plan to keep a copy of the 300DPI files so I can make a print on demand version of this book, but I'm willing to bulk resize the images to a smaller size for PG. The question is what a good size would be?
Thanks.
James Simmons