Re: Images +a bit about translations

Ken Arromdee <[email protected]> Mon, 2 Jun 2014 00:30:47 -0700 (PDT)
Newsgroups gmane.culture.literature.e-books.gutenberg.volunteers
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sun, 1 Jun 2014, James Adcock wrote:
> One can find plenty of awful page image books too -- page images containing
> images which require a great deal of digital image manipulation to get them
> to a "readable" [or viewable] state.

Yes, you can find them.  (Even otherwise good archive.org page image books are
typically in .jp2 format and cannot be read without a conversion that takes
minutes even on a fast machine.)

And awful as they are, they're still better.  At least you can do *something* to
be able to read them with good images, even if it is a lot of work.  Doing
excess work to get something is pretty awful--but it still beats not being
able to get it at all.

> [I know I am reluctant to submit books over
> 10 meg in size -- due to downloading speed/cost issues for e-book readers on
> slow cellphone connections.]

You gave the solution yourself: have a way to download books with images of
various sizes.

If you submit the book using large images, that can be converted to a book
with small images.  If you submit a book with small images, that *cannot* be
converted to a book with large images, because by only submitting it using small
images, you've thrown away information that cannot be recreated.  Even if only
a portion of the audience is helped by large images, the fact that image size
conversion is one way makes it very suboptimal to make them permanently small.

Furthermore, although you argue that small images are a necessary tradeoff,
that matches up with PG rules only by coincidence.  PG merely says that the
submitter should use small images, not as part of a tradeoff, but because
the rules were written long ago and nobody changed them.
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