“Yeah,” Mike said, “but more people are going to be reading with iPads and other devices that can handle larger sizes gracefully. And 256 colors is so 20th century.”
He’s got a point – the 256 colors looks crappy on my main computer. But that’s not the market I’m designing for. Just this morning (it’s Black Friday), quite a few eBook readers sold out of online outlets of box stores. The low-end readers as well.
There are ways to present different resolutions of images – Scott Westerfeld’s Behemoth for example, does it well with multiple sizes and formats of images. (The illustrations are gorgeous, and why I purchased a hardcover edition as well.) The eBook is also huge because of all the images – 24 megs when most eBooks are half a meg or so.
But I also know that no – or crappy – cover art is a significant annoyance. Several of the titles I’ve bought from large publishers simply have the title page (with its fancy font) as the cover image. That’s annoying as well; I like seeing the cover. For example, when I bought Jim Hines’ book Red Hood’s Revenge,
I was presented with this as the eBook cover:
When this is the real cover:
Maybe the best solution is to do something like what Behemoth does and have multiple versions of images. WIth only one major image per book, it won’t be a major issue for most.
What do you think? Are images – and I mean cover art and interstitial artwork here – important to your reading experience?
1 As I hobnobbed with the cremé de la cremé of authors, all possessing a certain je ne sais quoi along with several other phrases in other languages. Or in other words, I’m providing context for this musing, not just namedropping.
2 The only times I’ve had my Sony Reader crash were due to eBooks trying to load too many images – and page turns got a LOT slower if each “chapter” had many images in it.