Re: Image sizes

Hi James, All,

You have made a good point about flaky connections. 
But, on the other side how often does it occur that one decides
on the fly that one needs a large ebook right away.
That is I personally, load and update my ebook on the devices
generally, at home!  Especially, the larger ones. 

Another point you state is that of the capabilities of the devices!
I have to admit I do not own a dedicated e-reader and never will,
 exactly because of their short comings. Most dedicated e-readers are still black and
white and are not tuned to graphics. Furthermore, black and white
images are very small compared to color images.

The point on PG users preferring to download ebooks without images
may have to do with capabilities of their ereaders. Furthermore, many of the 
ebooks with images, the images are relatively simple and there are not that many
in them, so most likely not that interesting.
I do not believe that PG has that many ebooks where images are an essential part of 
the content.
Then there is the question of the ratio of ebooks with images compare to those without!
Yet, I do not think the statistics are very relevant to the discussion at hand.

Taking your book with the 82 images, the question is what would be a best practice.
As your have indicated you ruined the "graphics" for the sake of file size, which is in
my opinion a big mistake! 

Choosing the proper file formats for images is actually not that hard, if you have a little
knowledge. I had mention jpeg. It is fine for color images, yet has many issues with black and white
(or should I say grayscale) and using gif will, more often than not, give far smaller file sizes! 

I have suggested offering two versions: one with poor quality and a second with high quality.
Not hard to do! If the source is written properly, all it requires is that the images are batched process
and the ebooks then generated separately. 

We could go even further offer versions with and without color. 

I have also stated that even high resolution images with a high compression rate still
offer displayed images with an adequate quality. The blur incurred will not be noticeable
by most or not bothersome on most devices.

regards
	Keith.

 
Am 27.01.2014 um 21:03 schrieb James Adcock <[email protected]>:

>> Personally, 13 Meg is in this day and not at all that much.
> with a 2 Mbit (roughly what you get with 3G) connection that would take
> about 1 min to download!
> 
> In my experience such large ebooks end up not downloading at all because the
> download "breaks" before completing to an ebook reader.
> 
> I don't see the statistics on PG's site anymore, but what I remember is that
> PG customers are overwhelmingly choosing to download the ebook versions
> which do not have images at all.
> 
> I think you have a dichotomy here between "desktop" HTML readers, who have
> fast machines, large displays, and fast downloads, and ebook EPUB/MOBI users
> who may be in locations with "1X" flaky cellphone connections, or a flaky
> airport lounge, slow machines, tiny displays, and slow and easily breakable
> downloads.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gutvol-d mailing list
> gutvol-d-4LCm/o+qPMZ96Xl/[email protected]
> http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

_______________________________________________
gutvol-d mailing list
gutvol-d-4LCm/o+qPMZ96Xl/[email protected]
http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d