Customer Reviews

Graphics on the Kindle (both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2) (The "Graphics on the Kindle" Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was very disappointed in this book. Admittedly, I've been working in Photoshop for a decade, but other reviews suggested that even the experienced pro would find value in this book. Instead it was a high-level summary of information I had easily gleaned from quick google searches, with specific Photoshop instructions on how to do things like brighten an image.

If you know absolutely nothing about image manipulation and have a copy of Photoshop (what are the odds?) then this might be a decent primer to quickly learn the few skills you'll need to convert to Kindle-friendly files. (Though the formatting is poor and difficult to read.)

Otherwise I suggest you buy a latte and search free tutorials -- you'll pick up the vast majority of the same information quickly.

Graphics On The Kindle, 2nd Edition
by Manuel Burgos


Manuel Burgos's book, Graphics On The Kindle, 2nd Edition, is a must-have for any author who hopes to have a marketable product on Kindle. What good is a well-written book if no one will open it? If realtors say, "Location, location, location," authors should be saying, "Cover, cover, cover."

In fact, it must have been the cover on Graphics On The Kindle, 2nd Edition, that drew (no pun intended) me to this book. I have no other recollection of how I found it. All I knew was that I was a writer, not an artist. I needed help! I was just learning to navigate around the Kindle as a reader. Creating the cover for my Kindle book Bears in the Hibiscus, was beyond intimidating.

Burgos's book is a step by step guide for creating not only covers, but inside graphics. His illustrations use Photoshop, but he suggests other alternative programs that will work.

I have to confess I was so fascinated by his methods that I had to force myself to stay on task and focus on the problem at hand: converting my cover to Kindle. As I am very tech-impaired, and have time limitations (I'm already in my sixties), I chose to have Burgos and his company, Rare Arts, do my cover for me. I did so with regret. His instructions are so simple and easy to follow that it would be a lot of fun to play with photos using Burgos's book. If you're an author, and don't know about the 16 levels of gray, you need this book!

Janelle Meraz Hooper, author

How delightful to discover this gem just as I'm preparing the graphics for the Kindle edition of Snake Jazz, the baseball memoir of a retired major league pitcher. "Graphics on the Kindle" kindly led me step by step and saved me days of trial and error. And the end product was wonderful; especially for the scanned pictures of very old newspaper photos.

This little booklet is a godsend! While I am no graphic artist (which should be obvious), I found the tips in Manuel's book to work absolutely flawlessly. I used Manuel's methods to make the cover for my book and it skated through Amazon's DTP on the first try.

Graphics on the Kindle is a "must read" for anyone publishing an ebook with the DTP platform. Thanks, Manuel!

David Emberson
Author, The Kindle Cookbook: How To Do Everything the Manual Doesn't Tell You

One of the wonderful things about the marketplace of the mind that is opened up by the Kindle and other new technologies is that it allows us to focus on the things that we choose, the things we know about, the things we want to learn about, the things that drive us, the things that we are passionate about. Which I suppose is a flowery way of saying that, when there are skills that we do not have, we can find others who have these skills, who share them with us in terrific little e-books like this one. Whether you want to learn how to have fun with graphics on your own Kindle or incorporate graphics into a Kindle document, Manuel Burgos is a great go-to guy to have on your side. I was so impressed with what I read in Graphics on the Kindle that I contacted Manuel and engaged him to help me with the cover design for the print-on-paper version of Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies (... to Unleash an Indie Movement of Readers and Writers), and he did a wonderful job. I have no doubt that I will go back to him when it is time for a print-on-paper version of How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email & Other Cool Tricks: Read and Answer Email Anywhere, Anytime on the Amazing Amazon Kindle (The Complete User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle).

I don't know if my knowledge level was just way beyond this book, or whether the 5-star reviews are friends and family, but I was deeply disappointed in this book. The cover was definitely the best part -- the information is thin, and it's not well formatted!

I could not help but chuckle at the irony. He writes a Kindle book explaining how to make an eyecatching Kindle book cover, but when designing the cover for his own book, the author uses an illegible font at a size which you cannot read - even on the Amazon website!

Doesn't bode well...

This is probably the best how-to-publish-on-Kindle book I have read. The author reveals the techniques required to include just about any kind of graphic in your Kindle book. Well written and very professional.

Quick, concise, informative, little book on preparing graphic and photos to publish in Kindle and other ebook distributors. Since Kindle has become the leader in electron book distribution. I personally would focus only on Kindle. This is not a definitive work, but is full of pointer, suggestion and valuable nuggets. However if the reader is not at least somewhat proficient with Photoshop Elements, this book is not for them. But if you are planning to write and publish on Amazon's Kindle and use any kind of graphic of photo you will need to know information in this book and Photoshop, it, like Kindle are standards of the industry. It is worth the investment of time to learn your tools.

Burgos' book is clear and straight forward. I used the specifications listed in the book to "Kindle-lize" the graphics for my novel, The Unselfish Gene. Being a somewhat experienced Photoshop user, I didn't need the step-by-step instructions, but I found it re-assuring the author included them. Even better, when I emailed Mr. Burgos prior to buying the book, I got a personal reply within 24 hours.

I've attached a photo showing one the graphic images from my novel as it actually appears on the Kindle -- thanks to this book.

And if you don't have Photoshop, I think you could squeak by with something like Infraview, which is available for free download. Also, there's GIMP, which is also free and ported for Vista now, but it has a fairly steep learning curve.