Designing a Fixed Layout Childrens Book for Print and Kindle

When we designed Sascha Martin’s Rocket-Ship, we chose an 8” x 10” format for the print edition, because it was an industry-standard size that CreateSpace could produce easily.

For our fixed layout eBook we settled on a page size of 640 x 1024 pixels, based on a recommendation by Charles Spender in his book Formatting of Children's Books and Comics for the Kindle. It gave us a different aspect ratio of 10:16 for the eBook, compared with 8:10 for print. It displayed well because its ratio of 10:16 matches the screens of Kindle’s newer devices.

But it meant that Manuela, right from the very beginning, was designing pages not just for two different formats, but for two different layouts as well.

Manuela solved this problem by using guidelines on each page that showed where the Kindle image would sit within the larger print version. You can see the guides in this early sketch (above) that Manuela made for the cover. She kept all the text and all the essential imagery inside these guide lines, so that nothing vital would be lost in the narrower eBook format.

Extra, non-essential details filled the space outside the guidelines in the printed version.

The image on the left shows a page from Sascha Martin's Rocket-Ship. You can see the two formats side by side, with the wider, print version on the left, and the narrower Kindle version on the right.

But now that we're starting a new project with Sascha Martin’s Time Machine we’re going to try something different. We’ll keep the print version at 8” x 10”, but this time the Kindle layout will use the same 8:10 aspect ratio with a page size of 1200 x 1500 pixels.

In practical terms this means that Manuela only needs to produce one set of drawings, which will work for both formats - no cropping necessary. But it also opens new possibilities for the way we handle the pages on Kindle, and particularly the spreads.

More on this in the next post.