eBook Formatting

Why The Kindle Hasn’t Changed Books, and Other Slightly Ridiculous Questions

21 December, 2017 // 12 Comments

Over on Wired David Piece asks the same slightly ridiculous question outside pundits ask every so often: why Amazon has failed to change books as an art form as much as it has changed the book [Read More ...]

Xkcd, Kerning, Full-Width Justification, Kerning, and Light Sabers

4 May, 2016 // 14 Comments

Between its strips on kerning, dates, and diacritics, the webcomic xkcd has shown itself to be adept at poking fun at bad formatting. Today the webcomic turned its attention to kerning again, [Read More ...]

Amazon Now Freaking Out Over TOC Location in Kindle eBooks?

11 March, 2016 // 20 Comments

Every so often Amazon decides to crack down on violations of some rule in its voluminous ToS or Kindle publishing guidelines, or even just because readers are complaining. In the past Amazon has [Read More ...]

Yesterday’s News, and Tomorrow’s: Badly-Formatted Kindle eBooks Will (Continue to) Display an Error Message

21 January, 2016 // 13 Comments

An old story cropped up yesterday as "new" news when it may be anything but. According to one of my competitors: Starting February 3, 2016 Amazon will begin showing customers a warning message on the [Read More ...]

The Kindle’s New Typography is Hard to Pin Down, But It Is Pretty

31 May, 2015 // 19 Comments

Several days ago Amazon released a new version of the Kindle app for iPad and iPhone which added a new font (Bookerly), hyphenation, and all around better text rendering. To hear some tell it, this [Read More ...]

Is Nonfiction eBook Formatting Still Terrible on Tablets?

10 November, 2014 // 22 Comments

The latest edition of UI guru Jakob Nielsen's newsletter showed up in my inbox this morning, and it focuses on a topic near and dear to my heart: ebook formatting. One might think that ebook [Read More ...]

Video: Why eBook Text Layout is Terrible

16 October, 2014 // 20 Comments

Ever wonder why the ebook you're reading on a Kindle rarely looks as nice as the edition? Computerphile sat down with Professor Steven Bagley of the University of Nottingham, who takes us through the [Read More ...]

J K Rowling’s New eBook Looks Like $18 of Crap on the Nook and Kindle

27 September, 2012 // 11 Comments

Publishers like to justify their ridiculous ebook prices by claiming to offer great value for the price. I'm sure that's what Hachette was thinking when they set the ebook price for Casual Vacancy, J [Read More ...]