Picture books on Kindle

Kate and I just finished reading My Father's Dragon last night.  I spotted it in the Kindle storeand it was only 99 cents, so I thought it would be fun to read together.

We've read a couple of heavily-illustrated books on the Kindle.  It's been interesting to see how it handles the pictures. I took some screen shots, in case anyone else is curious about this.



Apparently the way the text splits around the pictures in the book is a bit different from what they chose to do in this ebook edition. I can see why they changed it, but for some reason they felt the need to insert "illustration appeared here" in the text, often right in the middle of a sentence.  I found this annoying.



These drawings are so cute and detailed. The small screen size is a bit of a disadvantage here. (The original illustrations are also black and white.)



Vertical pictures fill up the screen pretty well. Horizontal pictures come out much smaller, since of course they can only be as wide as the screen.



You can change the orientation to landscape, which increases the available width and makes the picture bigger, but it's awkward to flip back and forth. (Unfortunately there isn't a quick and easy way to do this--it requires multiple clicks each time.)

Kate and I both enjoyed the story (we read it in three installments). It was fun to see the pictures but I do think we would need to read the paper book version to really appreciate the drawings properly. We'll have to get the other two books out of the library to find out what happens next.

We also read Dick King-Smith's Funny Frank. Many of Mr. King-Smith's books feature animals behaving in unconventional ways, such as a pig who wants to fly,or a cat who keeps pet mice.This one is about a chicken who wants to swim.



There are quite a lot of illustrations--pretty much one per page. The drawings are small and simple, so I don't think you really lose anything viewing them on the Kindle screen.




The spacing of the pictures leads to large blank areas on some pages, which can make you think you're at the end of a chapter when you really aren't.



And there was this one egregious formatting error. Grrr.

This is a short chapter book for young readers. It's a cute story, if you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept that someone could make a wet suit for a chicken out of a hot water bottle, and that it would actually work.

Dick King-Smith is also the author of Babe,of course. He just passed away on January 4th. I have fond memories of reading some of his books to my siblings. I think Kate would enjoy hearing more of his stories. Another trip to the library!