I’ve been doing a lot of eBook design for Kindle recently. Even though I’m a book designer, and have been for a long time, I’m also an eBook reader and aficionado. I’ve been reading (and in many cases “rolling my own”) ebooks for many years, going back to my old Newton Message Pad 2100 and various Pocket PCs, including HP Jornadas, Casios, Toshibas, NECs, etc., so I know my way around formatting text to be read on an electronic device. The Kindle is a very nice device for reading books and, for the most part, is designed to enhance the reader’s experience, rather than the book designer’s experience.
Book designers can sometimes lose site of the fact that we’re dealing with text and the main purpose of text, in the end, is to be read. Good typography (at least for a novel) should disappear and be transparent to the reader. The reason I’m bringing this up is that most of the Kindle ebooks I’ve been seeing are released with full-justification, as is true of most traditional books. However, since the Kindle does not support hyphenation, having fully-justified text makes the reading experience less transparent. Full-justification without hyphenation can be harder to read, creating wide rivers of white space running vertically through the text and, occasionally, strangely formatted lines with only three words in them, spread across the page.
Since the Kindle is designed to allow the reader to increase the display font size, and scale and reflow text automatically, the issue with justified text becomes more obvious as the larger font sizes are used. As a rule of thumb, anybody designing for the Kindle should make it a habit to preview their books with the default font set to different sizes to make sure text is reflowing properly.
Unfortunately, despite the absence of hyphenation, The Kindle Lords (or “Lords of the Kindle” – I’m never sure which is the appropriate term) saw fit to make full-justification the default format, even though Justification and Hyphenation should go together like… um… whichever is the current, hot, trendy celebrity couple everyone is talking about. I’m sure many people who design ebooks don’t even realize it’s possible to override the Kindle justification defaults, but it is. And they should.
The key is to override the default in the CSS for the style that is applied to body text in the eBook – usually “p” with a couple of angle brackets aro. This involves directly editing the HTML file that contains the text of your book and inserting a definition for the body text tag in the Style section of your HTML file. The “text-align” statement is the important one.
Now, for those who wouldn’t touch HTML with a ten-foot pole, if you use Calibre to prepare the file for uploading your book to Amazon, you can override the justification settings from the “Look and Feel” section of the Conversion panel: Just change “Original” to “Left align.”
See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Your readers will thank you for it. Well… maybe not, but subliminally, they may appreciate it. I will thank you for it.
