The purpose of these blog posts is not to provide you with all the technical detail of how to complete the task of creating EPUB and Kindle format books, but to point out the finer points of detail that you might miss and which could end up leaving your book looking less than its best.
Today's post is about getting covers to look and behave correctly.
An EPUB requires that you have a file labelled cover.xhtml and this will simply place the image (cover.jpg) on a page.
I'm not going to copy out what the entire file looks look, there is an example by Keith Fahlgren on the Three Press Consulting blog. What is important though is if you want your cover to work in all viewers and in the Adobe Digital Editions thumbnail, then once again you'll need to turn to Liz Castro's book EPub Straight to the Point: Creating Ebooks for the Apple IPad and Other Ereaders
. In Chapter 3 of her book (p. 114) @lizcastro advises adding style="max-width: 100%" to the xhtml for your <img> - do not skim past this little detail. It is important and will make you look good. Without it you will find on certain readers the bottom of your cover chopped off or thumbnails displaying a corner of your cover not the whole thing.
On the Kindle things are simpler. Joshua Tallent explains in his book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle
how to upload a cover to the Amazon DTP site. If like me, however, you are using KindleGen to convert an EPUB then there is one simple step you need to take - delete the cover.xhtml file BUT leave the cover.jpg one in your images folder. KindleGen will automatically use this for thumbnail and cover without fuss. If you leave the cover.xhtml file in place, then your reader will be greeted by two identical covers one after the other, and flicking past two when reading a book looks a bit strange and is unnecessary.
Today's post is about getting covers to look and behave correctly.
An EPUB requires that you have a file labelled cover.xhtml and this will simply place the image (cover.jpg) on a page.
I'm not going to copy out what the entire file looks look, there is an example by Keith Fahlgren on the Three Press Consulting blog. What is important though is if you want your cover to work in all viewers and in the Adobe Digital Editions thumbnail, then once again you'll need to turn to Liz Castro's book EPub Straight to the Point: Creating Ebooks for the Apple IPad and Other Ereaders
. In Chapter 3 of her book (p. 114) @lizcastro advises adding style="max-width: 100%" to the xhtml for your <img> - do not skim past this little detail. It is important and will make you look good. Without it you will find on certain readers the bottom of your cover chopped off or thumbnails displaying a corner of your cover not the whole thing.On the Kindle things are simpler. Joshua Tallent explains in his book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle
how to upload a cover to the Amazon DTP site. If like me, however, you are using KindleGen to convert an EPUB then there is one simple step you need to take - delete the cover.xhtml file BUT leave the cover.jpg one in your images folder. KindleGen will automatically use this for thumbnail and cover without fuss. If you leave the cover.xhtml file in place, then your reader will be greeted by two identical covers one after the other, and flicking past two when reading a book looks a bit strange and is unnecessary.
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