This post by Joel Friedlander originally appeared on his The Book Designer on 6/22/15.
Many ebook readers—and not just us typography nerds and designers, either—have complained about the limited font set provided with the major e-readers.
Considering the vast sums that have been spent on developing these devices, it’s always seemed odd to me that they would trumpet their e-reading devices and commitment to book readers, then ship a product that aims to fulfill these promises… but only in one of these fonts:
- Baskerville
- Caecilia
- Georgia
- Helvetica
- Palatino
I’ve typeset books in Baskerville, but there’s Baskerville, then there’s Baskerville, a sturdy face with high stroke contrast and lovely long serifs, not the weak-tea version on the Kindle.
Now Amazon has put some work into upgrading both the font selection on its Kindle devices and apps, but also on other areas of typography that Kindle has historically fallen down on.
The rollout of these features seems to be happening slowly along Amazon’s product line, and it’s hard to tell which devices have received which upgrades.
On Amazon’s own site for the new Kindle PaperWhite, they list 5 new features:
Read the full post on The Book Designer.