Comments on: A detailed roadmap for Kindle 3, 4, 5, and beyond: Touchscreen, flexible large-form, notepad, color, & voila—the Kindle Reader and Mobile Net Device

By: John Mark Harris

John Mark Harris — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:10:14 +0000

What I’m looking for, is a device about the size of the 6″ screen model (e.g. portable) but “wall to wall” screen, with a stylus to make notes, touch screen & screen based keyboard that “hides” easy. If they’ll do that, I’d pay $300 for it. Color is not important, keep eInk at all costs. If that can be color, cool, if not, keep the low power use/easy on the eyes form.

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:28:00 +0000

Amazon is also in the position of already being the top dog… and as such, they can simply stay where they are, or progress very slowly, and hope to remain top dog as long as the competition can’t get its act together. And I hate to say, indications are that the competition may not get its act together for quite some time.

About the only real game-changer here is ePub: If everyone else embraces open-source, such that the competition becomes One against Amazon, Amazon will finally have a reason to care about staying ahead of the game, and will put serious effort into improving its product.

By: Alan Wallcraft

Alan Wallcraft — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:13:07 +0000

The 9.7″ Vizplex screen is 825×1200 (150 ppi)
http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html
I don’t think there is any doubt that Amazon has prototypes using this screen, and I expect them to actually release the device. However, I agree that predicting when Amazon will do something is almost impossible. Given Amazons product development cycle, it would be next year before they could introduce a large screen using any other low power technology.

By: Alan Wallcraft

Alan Wallcraft — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:30:55 +0000

pond: A Google search found
http://www.munseys.com/technosnarl/?p=281
which says that the information came from an e-mail from Amazon (presumably to their Kindle DTP publishers).

By: Windwalker

Windwalker — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:55:38 +0000

Interesting, and thanks for passing it on. Is it possible that the dimension recommendation of 825 x 1200 pixels came from a third party (okay, I know it’s not *really* a third party) such as the Mobipocket Creator help pages? This corresponds to the information provided by Joshua Tallent in his excellent Kindle Formatting book, and he adds “This brings up another benefit to creating a Mobipocket file for your book: when the book is loaded onto the Kindle 2, the cover image will default to display full-screen, without any of the header or footer information, which makes it look very nice on the Kindle 2 screen.”

From which I infer that the 1200-pixel image-upload length is optimal not only for anticipated larger screens (whether on Kindle hardware or on, e.g., an 8×10 iPod TouchTablet), but on the 4.75 x 3.5 Kindle 2 display.

Here’s what Amazon says on its “support” page, last updated on Jan 2, 2008, for its Digital Text Platform publishing site for Kindle publishers:

“Digital Text Platform Community Support

Amazon DTP » Support Home » Formatting Guide » Document 191

[191] Full-screen Images « Back to Category
Author: DTP Admin, Created on: Jan 2, 2008 7:39 PM
Keywords: comics, full-screen, images, photos
Language: English

Click for a printer friendly version of this document Printer Friendly Click to watch this document Watch Document

To make sure an image uploaded to DTP (referenced from HTML) shows up in the largest possible size, use the following formatting options:

* Images larger than 450 by 550 pixels are always re-sized by DTP
* Images inside content (i.e. referenced by HTML) need to be 64kb or smaller, otherwise they may get re-sized during the conversion process.
* Keep the image in an aspect ration of 9 to 11, which causes it to be re-sized to take up as much screen space as possible
* The ‘Preview’ application does not convert images for display accurately. This means that it will show larger images to be rotated or re-sized even if they aren’t going to be changed in the final Kindle content. This is a known issue with the Preview. As long as your images conform to the rules above, they will remain unchanged as Kindle Editions.”

By: pond

pond — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:42:08 +0000

As far as a bigger-screen Kindle, I think we can get a clue from these ‘tips’ for publishing on Kindle given by Bezos. I don’t recall where I culled these, whether from a quote of Bezos or from the Amazon site, but note the dimensions:

“Kindle publisher guidelines:

“Books must have a logical cover:

“The logical cover is the cover that is embedded within the .prc file that is created when you compile your ebook to the Mobipocket format. If you look at books that have a logical cover, you’ll find a good size cover image when you go to the very front of the book. It is the image that appears alone and is centered. The recommended resolution is in the 150-200 dpi range and the recommended size is 825 x 1200 pixels (note this is larger than previously recommended). However, do not scale up an image to artificially meet the 825 x 1200 pixels recommendation.”