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Kindle books new procedure remains a problem — 2 Comments

  1. Amazon must have gotten a lot of flack for displaying images more poorly than iBooks and this is their (over)reaction. There was a time when Amazon had some rather nasty restrictions on image size. I can remember cranking down my jpeg compression to a 7 or 8 to meet them. Some pictures did not like that.

    Would you happen to know what they do when sent a 4-inch-wide, 150-dpi image? That’d been my standard submission thus far. More than that seems a waste.

    Also, what does this mean for Amazon’s hideously over-priced file download fees for ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99? Are they dropping those fees? If they’re not, then these larger image requirements are going to bite deeply into author royalties. I just checked, and those fees are still listed. Here is what it says:

    —-
    Delivery Costs are equal to the number of megabytes we determine your Digital Book file contains, multiplied by the Delivery Cost rate listed below. Amazon.com: US $0.15/MB

    https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A29FL26OKE7R7B
    —-

    At 15 cents per MB—highway robbery by any standard—it wouldn’t take many images to grab all an author’s royalties, leaving him with nothing.

    I just checked one of my recent ebooks, Senior Nurse Mentor, and its 21 images come to almost 4.5 MB as uploads. Not even taking the text into account, that means Amazon is already grabbing about a third of my $2 income from the book as “download fees.” Going from 150 dpi images to 300 dpi ones means four times the size and four times the download fees. On an ebook where my earnings are $2.06, my calculated download fee now comes to about $2.70. Even if Amazon doesn’t dun me for the added cost. which 64 cent more than they should be paying me, I won’t be earning a penny of those books.

    There is a quite easy fix if Amazon continues to charge those inflated fees and demand large images. Keep the images in my other editions and revise the Kindle version to make it image free. I certainly can’t see the sense in publishing a book on which I make nothing.

    Keeping these fees also seems to defeat Amazon’s alleged purpose for this change—making the graphics in its ebooks look as good as those in iBooks. It illustrates yet again that Amazon doesn’t understand books. All it understands is squeezing every penny it can out of publishers and authors. Money is the company’s be-all and end-all.

    –Mike

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