I’ve been pretty happy about the quality of eBook purchases so far. There’ve been a few rough edges but nothing major.
That changed when I bought a Kindle version of “David and the Phoenix” by Edward Ormondroyd a few weeks ago. This is a classic children’s storybook which is no longer in copyright. It is also beautifully illustrated by Joan Raysor.
Unfortunately the version I bought did not have any of the illustrations. Instead, everywhere there was supposed to be a picture there was instead just the text “[ILLUSTRATION].” To their credit, when I complained to Amazon about the problem they immediately refunded the purchase.
That still left me with a problem. I still wanted an illustrated ebook copy. I set out on my quest and unfortunately all the Kindle-compatible versions I found were either without illustrations or were very poorly formatted.
I came across a free version with illustrations in HTML and was able to reformat the text, table of contents and images such that it would display nicely on the Kindle. After much toil I got a beautifully displayed Kindle version with all the original illustrations.
Since the source I used was freely redistributable, I opened up a publishing account with Amazon and published my version with them, which you can now get here:
David and the Phoenix (Kindle Edition)