The Kindle at last gets Typography that doesn’t Suck

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader is an attractive single-function device, with an industrial design ethos that, in its singular focus on the purity of e-studying, even Dieter Rams might love. The iOS and Android apps are even nice. however no matter what device you learn on, the Kindle’s typography and typesetting has all the time been slightly of a disaster, with six totally different typefaces, which might be barely suitable for studying an actual e book. (Who reads books in Futura, in any case?) As for the typesetting, “hideous” is the phrase many kind lovers would use to explain it.

but today, Amazon is making an incredible step towards better typography on the Kindle. no longer handiest are they unveiling Bookerly, the primary typeface designed for the Kindle for scratch, however they are ultimately fixing the Kindle’s typesetting issues with an all-new format engine that introduces better textual content justification, kerning, drop caps, image positioning, and extra.

Bookerly – the first Font Designed for Kindle

replacing Caecilia as the new default font for Kindle, Bookerly is a serif that has been customized-made by Amazon to be as readable throughout as many different types of screens as conceivable. Like Google’s Literata, Bookerly is meant to deal with the various aesthetic concerns surrounding e-e book fonts.

In appearance, it appears something like if Baskerville, a 225-yr-old typeface that has been proven to form our perception of fact, and Caecilia made a baby. each of those guardian fonts had been prior to now to be had on the Kindle, but they’d issues. On low-res units, Baskerville’s thin, dependent lines seemed crude, the place as Caecilia, a slab serif, was only a odd option for Amazon’s previous default font: despite the fact that it’s extremely readable, it’s one of those font highest used for headlines, now not physique textual content, because slab serifs frequently appear and feel bolded, even when they are now not.

Bookerly addresses both of those considerations. it doesn’t matter what monitor you might be on, Bookerly used to be designed from the bottom-up to be even more readable that Caecilia. consistent with Amazon’s inner assessments, that suggests it is about 2% more uncomplicated on the eye. that will appear to be a small growth, however unfold that 2% across thousands and thousands of Kindle customers and billions of pages of e-reading, and it all begins so as to add up.

read Bookerly at a lot better font sizes, and some of the fonts subtle touches are allowed to shine: as an instance, the fragile manner the upper arm nearly licks the stem of the lower case ‘okay’. Bookerly even comprises some lovely ligatures that makes reading on the Kindle feel more like printed typography, like the best way the terminal on a decrease case ‘f’ will exchange the tittle on the lower case ‘i’, if they’re right subsequent to each other.

while Bookerly’s not an entirely new typeface—Amazon silently gentle-launched it on the Kindle hearth prior this yr, a construction simplest a few folks noticed—it can be a phenomenal font. And in my checking out, i believed it was even more fine than Palatino, the typeface I prior to now used on my Kindle.

Digital Typesetting that does not Suck

but to be honest, Bookerly’s now not in reality what has me excited. The Kindle’s new structure engine? which is some other story. After virtually eight years, Amazon’s ultimately beginning to get e-guide typesetting bloody right.

previous to lately’s update, when you learn an e-e book on the Kindle, sentences had been absolutely justified. In different phrases, regardless of how giant your font size, Kindle’s invisible instrument all the time laid-out the page so that the left and right margins were utterly straight. And it was unsightly. phrases were by no means cut up throughout traces, so there could be as many as 1/2-a-dozen areas between words.

Printed books simply don’t handle typesetting in this way: they match as many phrases right into a line as possible while sustaining the spacing between them, and they are not afraid to either wreck a word in 1/2 to hyphenate it or to depart a niche at the end of a line.

but the new app ultimately gives the boot to the hideous absolute justification of text that the Kindle’s been rocking due to the fact 2007. the new structure engine justifies textual content extra like print typesetting. despite the fact that you max out the font dimension on the new Kindle app, it is going to keep the spacing between words even, intelligently hyphenating phrases and spreading them between lines as want may be.

The structure engine additionally contains some stunning new kerning choices. they’re delicate, but while you see them, that you can’t unsee them: as an instance, the way that the top and backside of a drop cap on the Kindle now perfectly strains up with the tops and bottoms of its neighboring traces. Like I stated, it is a small element, but one that even Apple’s iBooks and Google Play Books doesn’t have the capacity to fairly get proper.

just a quick be aware for those who don’t see the stronger format engine while you update the app. Amazon needs to reprocess every ebook of their Kindle catalog to fortify the characteristic. they may be currently working thru an extensive backlog, so in the event you don’t see any development, re-download your ebook, or are attempting once more later. one of the most books updated so far can be discovered right here.

the future

Instapaper founder Marco Arment as soon as lamented that the Kindle’s typography and format engine used to be so dangerous, it felt find it irresistible handiest had a workforce of one individual “who’s most effective allowed to work on it for a few weeks each and every 12 months.” which is apparently no longer real: Amazon tells me that the Kindle crew is significantly higher than only one dude, despite the fact that they refuse to give actual numbers. but they are privy to the criticisms from lengthy-time Kindle customers, and hope this new update will deal with some of their pet peeves.

“In e-books, you may have this tension, between the purity of a ebook’s structure because it used to be anticipated in print, and the flexibleness that e-reading brings to a customer, via allowing you to increase font measurement, read books across multiple units, and so forth,” says Dave Limp, senior vice chairman of Amazon units. “it’s a stress between the gorgeous however static nature of print, and the dynamism of digital. We’re seeking to strike a stability between those two things.”

It has confirmed a difficult task, drawing criticism from the likes of Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber, who as soon as stated: “Amazon’s intention should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. they may be now not even close.”

Limp’s feedback, then again, recommend that Amazon had criticisms like this in mind. “We do care. Our intention at Amazon is to sooner or later make digital typography as rich as it is in print. i am no longer positive precisely when that day will come, however i’m confident we can get there.”

Amazon up to date the Kindle app for iOS with Bookerly and a new structure engine these days this morning. some other update rolling out the brand new font and typesetting know-how to users of Amazon’s line of e-ink readers, Android, and other units will probably be available later this summer season.