Tim’s Comments (group member since Jan 24, 2013)

Tim’s comments from the Help with Book Formatting group.

Ellie wrote: "Let me know how that works, I tried using GIF and making the conversion with mobipocket and didn't work. Only recognizes JPG and maybe PNG.



I've used gifs with no problem, but I use KindleGen. KindleGen 2 doubled the filesize it compresses images for reflowable books (to 127Kb) and upped to 256kb for fixed format (which I haven't used yet). If you've got an epub as a starting point, I'd definitely switch from MobiPocket to Kindlegen.

BTW: Amazon has some guidelines for image support here http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/Ama...

Jo, Not sure what will happen with Word, but I know if you save files from Word to filtered html, Word will compress the images without warning you, which took me ages to work out :-)

Jo, you wondered what advantage there is to using html. Images were the game changer for me. If you use Kindlegen, you can get higher quality images, but if you run it over the html output from Word, you will get the dreaded small font problem (which was also caused by the InDesign plugin, don't know if it still is). Now that the Paperwhite has a greater width in pixels, and KF8 Kindles scale differently from old Mobi7) I don't see any way to reliably scale images for Kindle without using html coding and media queries. Once you've got your head round it, it's not tricky.

Jo wrote: "Can anyone suggest any good books which provide real formatting help? I've downloaded a few in the past which haven't been that good to be honest.

If you have some which you recommend, please add ..."
I read one recently from Paul Salvette. http://www.amazon.co.uk/eBook-Design-... It's pretty good if you want to do the strip down to html approach. I was thinking of writing a decent 'how to do eBook formatting' book myself, as much of what I've seen is pretty poor, but Paul's pretty much written it already. The swine :-)

Hi Jo,
I use Microsoft Word 2010 and Adobe Acrobat Pro. Photoshop CS6 for images. Notepad++, Sigil, and Kindlegen for eBooks.

I'm interested in what people say about this. I get hundreds of book manuscripts sent to me every year, and about 90-95% have been written in Microsoft Word, often Word for Mac. That surprises me because on discussion boards such as this, the proportion of Word users seems much lower.