New INSIDE Cover for Kindle

As of October 2011 Amazon have provided a new service where by leaving a box ticked at Item 4 in the Upload of a book, the same Product Image will be inserted into the book.

 upload tutorial

This is a full screen image and is referenced in the pulldown menu as "cover" [and if you still simply add your own image it is not full page and is no longer on the pulldown, even if you added a cover tag in html].

Now there has been much gnashing of teeth on the Kindle Boards that this will add great cost to the download fee [15 cents per mb] and 16 cents has been quoted by one of the posters, so we have done a test to see the ACTUAL cost and it turns out to be less than ONE cent.

First calc was to subtract the size of the sample azw file we sent to the authors [without inside image] from the size of the Purchased azw file after book was published and it came to 55 kb for the cover image.

The cover image had been scanned by the authors from the paperback version of the book and was 2,500 high and some 600 kb.  We Resized that for them to 900 high at 100% jpg compression/quality and it was some 450 kb, that being the one that was uploaded.

Here is the book A Butler's Life

And if you don't understand compression/quality here is a Tutorial

So how did this image reduce down to 55 kb?  Well as explained in our Word to Kindle Book 2 we used pixlr.com to first resize image to 600 high [a guess at what Amazon does] and then save at 80% compression [which is what we calculated Amazon use in our Book 2 above].

BINGO - exactly 55 kb, and here is a comparison of the 450 kb and 55 kb images

 

You will see that the smaller image at 55 kb is not visibly degraded.

So there is the answer to the teeth gnashing, ie less than one cent extra for Download charges per book or 0.30 % decrease in profit.