How to do a cover in EPUBs and Digital Editons
By Paul Biba
The Adobe Digital Editons Blog has an article, Working with the Cover, on covers that should be of interest to anyone preparing his or her own e-book.
The covers on your books make a first impression. So when you’re creating a cover for a book you’re likely to put in some extra effort to make sure it looks good. When you’re working with EPUBs and Adobe Digital Editions, there are some simple things that you can do that have a big impact on the look of the covers.
March 28th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
The article mentions SVG in passing. I hope they do a follow-on article about using SVG for covers. Using a bitmapped image is always a compromise, as you never know what size screen it will be viewed on.
March 28th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Take a look at their best practices guide then Joseph, they provide an example with SVG.
I still find this whole process very complex: defining the cover properly in the metadata would help reading systems and content providers.
March 28th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Thank you, Paul, that was useful. And there are other informative links on that site.
Following the process described will create a nice cover for Adobe Digital Editions.
Question:
Will this also be nice-looking cover for other methods of reading ePub: for example: Stanza, BookWorm, Calibre, and so on ? …
After years of waiting for a standard, ePub arrives at last — thank goodness! … But it would be unfortunate if we needed create a different book cover size for every different ePub reading system.
What is strange about this A.D.E. approach is that the size of your book cover (the aspect ratio) is determined by the thumbnail size: 90 x 130. … That’s not an ugly proportion, but I like more flexibility in my cover design.
And the “big” cover is much more important than the miniature one — so the horse should pull the cart, and not vice versa.