Is there a recommended “one size fits all” for dimensions and ppi to provide the best image of an eBook cover to serve various sellers, like Kindle, etc? I am just beginning to look into this, and while I understand a 1.5 aspect ratio (length to width) seems to be the standard, the actual pixels x pixels vary. Also, it seems Kindle wants 350 ppi. Isn’t this rather a high resolution? The drawback is that high resolution may create a larger file than desirable. I believe Kindle wants less than 5 MB, but another site wants the file to be under 2 MB. (BTW, maybe I’m dense, but…is this the size for the cover alone, or cover plus the book material?)
So, what pointers can the SD provide? Is there a sweet spot of specs to make a handsome eBook cover that will satisfy all eBook sellers? Thx!
ETA now that my family has gone to bed for the night: making a cover at these proportions served me fine when publishing to Nook, Kobo, and whatever else the multi-platform places published to.
A paperback cover is slightly wider and squatter–a very small amount that can be compensated for by putting adequate gutters on the Kindle version.
No, I’ve read it in two places. Kindle wants 350ppi. Or, 72 dpi. But, I don’t get the dpi jazz. If the point of eBooks is no paper, who cares about dpi? Are people going to start printing out my eBook cover? I am assuming dpi is a printer resolution, right? What else would it be?
PPI/DPI are pretty much irrelevant measures unless the image is going to be printed by a tool that does not automatically rescale images.
Images are X pixels wide by Y pixels high - period. A 1200x2400 pixel image can be tagged with any internal DPI, and devices (screen or printer) are free to honor it in trying to scale the image to the paper or display, or ignore it entirely and scale the image to any effective DPI it likes.
I think what Amazon is trying to get from authors, especially amateurs and novices, is an image of sufficient resolution to be useful, even if they display it fairly large as part of a book listing. If you design or create or output a “paperback” cover at 72 dpi, it will only be about 250x400 pixels in size, which is pretty grainy except for use at about 1x2 inches. So if you create the cover at “300 dpi” it will be closer to 1200x1800, a much more detailed image that can be displayed large or scaled down as needed. The *effective *ppi on the screen might only be 72-96, but good scaling from a larger image will produce a sharper result than something designed to that pixel dimension.