Re: Image sizes

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 09:28:05AM EST, James Adcock wrote:

> > There's a huge difference between the recommended-in-the-FAQ 40-60K
> > size and tens of megabytes.  You could double the image resolution
> > in both directions and it would still be a factor of *100* less than
> > the tens of megabytes that you fear.

> A recent book I did has 82 woodblock prints. I cut the image sizes
> down as much as I could with turning the woodblocks into horrible
> messes.  The resulting sizes where 60-100k each.  The resulting PG
> MOBI files (which granted, are Amazonian caca nowadays) are 13 megs.
> And these are what I consider to be "small" images.  To well-preserve
> the woodblock prints in their original glory would have required much
> larger files.

> Again, I am looking for practical "best practices" advice, not to be
> told that this isn't an issue. It is.

I recently bought The LaTeX Companion, 2nd edition published by
Addison-Wesley. 

The epub version turned out to be 123MB.

I unzipped the epub and found that the graphics weigh in at 130MB and
the embedded fonts at 26MB. There are no less than 1973 jpeg's ranging
in size from ~10K to ~300K.

To add insult to injury, these "graphics" are no glorious woodblock
prints.. many of them are just snippets of LaTeX code in plain old 7-bit
ASCII that probably add up to less than 1MB all told.

Needless to say it takes a while to open this book on a fairly recent
e-reader model such as the Kobo Glo'... and close to ten seconds with
Calibre's viewer running on a top-of-the line laptop.

So maybe we're not only looking at air-time here but also at
"accessibility".

As to the .mobi it is, wait for it..  231MB...!

I thought I'd mention this since this particular e-book comes from
a reputable publisher (not so sure about who runs their e-book
department..) and also because that's about one order of magnitude
larger than your book.

Of course my little anecdoote has nothing to do with Project Gutenberg,
and does not directly relate to your question... but I think it does say
something about current trends in the e-book business.

Anyway, nice to know that someone who is volunteering their work to
Project Gutenberg is concerned about good practices when those whose job
it is to do so... apparently couldn't care less. 

I'm quite curious to know what book you are working on so I can take
a look when it is published, if only to find out how you resolved your
problem.

Best of luck,

CJ

P.S. Any reason why you would not publish a trimmed down low-res version
and a larger high-res version of the book..?
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