Thursday, December 22, 2011

Monday, December 19, 2011

Pirates Board Kindle E-Books

Hi everyone!
Wow, it's been a while! I have so much going on right now (motherhood...keeping up with projects....Christmas...) that I haven't had time to write. However, I thought this was so cool, that I had to blog about it.

So, I'm at my part time job, sitting at the library desk, and browsing through our library's collection of e-books. My early Christmas gift was a Kindle-Keyboard, and I have enjoyed checking out our library books with it. (Thank you, Amazon, for deciding to play nice with libraries!) Anyway, to my great surprise, I saw that my "Pirate School" books are now available as Kindle-ebooks! So, of course I downloaded them. I was curious to see how the text interacted with the illustrations, and how the illustrations re-produced in e-ink.It was so cool to see my books in e-book format.

Overall, I thought that the black & white interiors looked very close (sometimes better) than the print versions. So, the quality of the reproduction of my black and white art gets a star.

Not so stellar is the image placement. Generally, the illustrations were placed well as long at the illustrations were spots and not full-age or half-page. Now, with children's books, I think that the ability to look at an image while you are reading is very important, and this was not possible for the full-page art in e-book format. You must read the text, then click the "page turn" button, and then you can view the illustration all by itself. Rather dissapointing were some of the half-page pieces. On several instance, the e-book cut off my artwork, and showed the "leftover" bits blown up really huge all alone on the next "page". this was weird, and I did not like to see my art cut up and mutated in this way. There was also some inconsistency in the size of the chapter openers (sometimes you saw the chapter number, image and start of the text, sometimes just the chapter number and image, sometimes just the chapter number with the image and text starting on the next page...)

Overall, it was interesting and fun for me to see my books translated into an e-book format. However, I think my daughter will be reading them in print, because Mommy is very particular about how her artwork looks. Besides, Olivia's new hobby is turning the pages in books!