Kindle Publishing Guidelines Update 2014.1.1

Amazon has quietly released a new revision of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines which makes just one change, and that is the removal of the questionable image limit previously mentioned in Section 5.2, as noted my previous discussion.

The following is the sentence as it read in the last edition, with the portion that has been removed italicized and highlighted in bold:

Images must be in JPEG format and must be smaller than 800 KB in size. Image files larger than 800 KB greatly increase download time for the book and require more space on the device. 

The line now simply reads "Images must be in JPEG format," with the image size restriction removed. This lends credence to my assertion that Amazon has an update to KindleGen pending, since the current version still compresses image files during conversion, regardless of the compression setting. The last KindleGen revision was 7-31-13.

More importantly, a test upload I did today shows that KDP is also still compressing images during conversion, so the statement (or lack thereof) regarding image size is currently irrelevant. All these recent changes may simply be Amazon attempting to clean up some confusing passages relating to images sizes, by removing them or any references to image limits that might be contradictory. Or, as Aaron Shepard has pointed out in private correspondence, it might only be the input size from which the image limits have been removed, while the output is still compressed. However, I have never experienced any restrictions on input sizes to KindleGen in the past, only to the final output size of individual images.

Either way, there is nothing content creators can do about it at this point, except to wait, and deal with these imposing restrictions in the meantime. The one small ray of hope in all this is that these recent changes to the Guidelines show that Amazon is at least giving some thought to the matter of image file size limits. With any luck they will remove them (or substantially increase them at any rate) and let the authors and illustrators decide for themselves how best to present their work.