[FM Discuss] Experiences with Booki and Create Space

James Simmons nicestep at gmail.com
Fri Feb 10 07:28:24 PST 2012


I just got a proof copy of a Create Space book I wrote using my own
installation of Booki.  Create Space had warned me that my images were
under 300 DPI and were not likely to look good printed out, but I
decided to try it out anyway.  What I found was that things like
drawings look OK at 150 DPI but photographs look just awful.  So for
technical manuals with screen grabs you'd be OK, no worse than Lulu,
but if you have photographs you're out of luck.

I wanted to see if Booki could handle higher resolution photos and I
found that somehow or other my Booki software can see photos in the
editor but the window to add new images does not show existing images
and if you try and upload a new image it won't complain but it won't
show your uploaded image either.  I know I reinstalled or upgraded
Booki a couple of times and this exact thing happened to me before.  I
vaguely remember having to copy my images to a new directory to solve
this but I'm damned if I can remember the details.

So what I'm doing now is I'm using the Word template that Create Space
provides, but I'm using it with Open Office.  I'm copying and pasting
individual chapters into the template and correcting things as I go.
This seems to be working OK, but I wish I didn't have to do it.

My cover design did not look as good on the book as I thought it
would, so I'll be redoing that as well.  I was using a Sans Serif font
and it looked kind of drab, so I'm switching to ChunkFive from
fontsquirrel:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Using The GIMP for cover designs and inserting the front and back
cover images into their wizard works OK.  The book cover they gave me
looks just like what I gave them, but I don't like the design as much
as I thought I would.

James Simmons



More information about the Discuss mailing list