Sharing Books is all about being creative, we really do not put any limits on the size, shape, or general nature of your kids book that you wish to publish with us. But there are some general tips that you should know before you go and upload a book to our site. These are industry standard practices that will help you get your book printed, maximize your work efforts, and increase your potential revenue as your work and our site develop.

Book sizing is going to become increasingly important for ebooks and for books published for both print and screen display. There are certain sizes that a print shop is best equipped to deal with, and when you go outside those sizes your books cost a lot more to print. For Sharing Books this is going to become an important issue when we bring on stream print on demand features and book ordering.

The dimensions of your book
You can make your book any size and shape that you wish. But there are some sizes and shapes that are standard in the publishing and printing industry. On Sharing Books, what we consider 'Standard Sizing' is as follows:

1. Standard US Letter - 216mm × 279mm ( 8.5" by 11" ) in landscape ( wide on the horizontal ) or portrait ( wide on the vertical ) layouts.
2. Standard A4 Size - 210mm × 297mm ( 8.3" × 11.7" ) in landscape or portrait layouts.
3. Standard US Half Letter - 140mm × 216mm ( 5.5" × 8.5" ) in landscape or portrait layouts.
4. Square - 203mm x 203mm ( 8" x 8" ) layouts.
5. Small Square - 101mm x 101mm ( 4" x 4" ) layouts.

The resolution of your book
The resolution of your book is the magic number that will determine the quality of your book when it is displayed on a screen and goes to print. Resolution is measured in Dots Per Inch ( DPI ) or Pixels Per Inch ( PPI ), they are effectively the same. In general the 'screen' on your computer has a resolution of 72 DPI. When it comes to print the sky is the limit when it comes to resolution, but 300 DPI is industry standard for high quality printing, anything higher moves into art and specialty printing.

There is one very important thing to keep in mind with resolution: the higher the resolution the larger the file size, and this relation ship is geometric in nature. For example a 4" by 4" image at 100 DPI, uncompressed, has a file size of 156kb, a 4" by 4" image at 200 DPI has a file size of 625kb.

You can set the resolution of your book to any size you wish, for print or screen, but we recommend that you split the difference between the highest quality and small file sizes. The ideal file size for publishing through Sharing Books is 150 DPI. You can go to a higher resolution, but keep in mind that books over 25MB in file size take a long time for many users to download ( 3 to 15 minutes on high speed ).

Why you would want to standardize your file size
There is a good reason to standardize the shape and resolution of your book: it means it is easy to print. As Sharing Books starts bringing on stream print-on-demand services, and as your books spread to teachers and families, printing will become increasingly important. Making sure that your book is an easy to print size, and an easy to download file will help you maximize your downloads and sales.

Labels: advice, tips n tricks