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Kindle Format 8 Guidelines

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Adapted from Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

Text Guideline #1: Body Text Must Use Defaults

The body text in a reflowable Kindle book (fiction and non-fiction) must be all defaults. The reason for this is that any styling on body text in the HTML will override the user’s preferred default reading settings. Users report such behavior as a poor reading experience. Here are the most important points:

Body text must not have a forced alignment (such as left aligned or justified).
Body text must use the default font size and line height. Body text should not use the tag or the font-size and line-height attributes in CSS.
Body text should not be primarily bold or italicized. Selected parts of the text can be bold or italicized for emphasis. This guideline only prohibits a book from being entirely bold, for example.
Body text should not have an imposed font color throughout the book. If you prefer to use imposed font color in some sections of your book, please do not use too light or too dark color. Light colors will not display with enough contrast on devices set to white backgrounds or on e Ink devices. Dark colors will not display well on devices set to black backgrounds. For grays, use colors within the hex value range of #666 to #999.
Body text must not have a white or black font color. Customers report this as a bad user experience because the text can become invisible when the Kindle is set to the same background color as the font.
Body text must not have a black or white background color. Customers report this as a bad user experience because it can create an awkward, boxy reading experience when the device background is set to a different color and because the text can become invisible when a user changes the background color setting on their device and the font color automatically inverts.
Customers report that they enjoy having the option to select a preferred typeface from a list of device defaults..

Text Guideline #2: Use CSS for Page Breaks

Do not insert blank lines of text to create page breaks. Use the CSS page-break-before and page-break-after attributes.

Text Guideline #3: Formatting Paragraphs

KindleGen automatically indents the first line of every paragraph by default. To change this behavior, use the text-indent style on the tag. For example:

 - no indentation of the first line
 - positive indent, 10% of the width of the page
 - positive indent, 5 em

To change the space before each paragraph, use the margin-top style on the tag.

Text Guideline #4: Other Encodings Are Supported

The source of a Kindle book can be encoded in many different ways. All encodings are supported, provided that:

• The encoding of the HTML files is clearly stated in the HTML; and

• The computer used for compiling the sources supports the encoding and knows how to convert it to UNICODE.

Amazon recommends specifying the encoding of the HTML files in the HTML itself by using the <meta> tag in the <head> section.

Example

<html>
<head> 
... ... ...
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Text Guideline #5: Spaces and Unicode Characters

The only supported spaces are the normal space, the non-breakable space ( ) and the zero-width non-joiner (&zwnj;). Use of any other space can break the selection, dictionary lookup, and line-wrap algorithms.

Do NOT use Unicode format characters, as they may cause problems.

Text Guideline #6: Monospaced Font Is Supported

Kindle uses a default font for content if none is specified; it also supports a monospaced font.

Kindle uses the monospaced font to render content in the following tags: <pre>, <code>, <samp>, <kbd>, <tt>, , .

With the exception of <pre>, the tags listed above do not change the text alignment. If the content in these tags should be left-aligned, wrap the tags listed above in a <div> styled with CSS using text-align:left.

Publishers can include their own font for their content. Amazon has a quality assurance process to ensure that these fonts display well on e Ink-based devices and do not impair the reading experience. Do not include the Charis font; it is replaced with a higher quality font in the Kindle Readers.

Text Guideline #7: CSS Support

The earlier Kindle platform offered very basic support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This has been significantly enhanced in KF8 with support for CSS 2/CSS 3. (See section 11.2 for the list of supported CSS attributes/selectors). To verify that your use of CSS elements displays the way you intended, preview your Kindle book on different devices before publishing it.

Avoid using fixed values such as points and pixels for CSS properties such as font-size, width, height, margin, padding, text-indent, and line-height. To enable rendering across various screen sizes and resolutions, specify these values in percentages.

When using the margin and padding CSS properties, specify the values in percentage (%) instead of em units. This ensures that the margins do not grow wide with large font sizes. Margins should be assigned values of 0 or greater to keep content from falling off the edge of the screen or overlapping

Kindle Publishing Guidelines Amazon.com 13 other content. Always set left and right margins to 0 for normal body text to allow users the full range of margin selection using device defaults.

To ensure pagination, the Kindle Reader does not honor line-height value less than 1.2 em or 120%.

Elements such as drop caps should be specified using percentages or relative units (positive or negative) instead of fixed values such as points and pixels. (Example: drop caps: Use font-size: 300%). The top of the drop cap should be aligned with the body text. To create drop caps, Amazon recommends using the following sample CSS:

Example

p.para { 
   font-family: "Times New Roman"; 
   font-size: 4em; 
   margin-bottom: 0; 
   margin-top: 0; 
   text-align: justify; 
   text-indent: 0; 
}
@media amzn-kf8 
{ 
   span.dropcaps 
   { 
      font-weight:normal; 
      font-size:320%; 
      float:left; 
      margin-top:-0.3225em; 
      margin-bottom:-0.3245em; 
   } 
}
@media amzn-mobi 
{ 
   span.dropcaps 
   { 
      font-size:3em; 
      font-weight: bold; 
   } 
}

To verify that the drop caps display as intended, test the book as described in section 9.1, Testing Kindle Books.

Text Guideline #8: Page Numbers

Kindle books do not always map directly to page numbers in physical editions of the book. For this reason, there should not be any reference to page numbers in the book. Page numbers should not be included in cross-references or the index. Amazon may make page numbers available for books as additional book metadata. Amazon generates these page numbers based on its own internal technology.

Text Guideline #9: Customizing Font Selection

The primary or main font in a book should be set at the <body> level. If you prefer to use additional text styling such as bold or italics, ensure that the styles are set on the text rather than the font so that any font that the customer selects correctly displays these styling elements. Below are examples of both correct and incorrect implementation of customizing fonts in an ebook. Incorrect HTML Code Correct HTML Code

<html> <body>
 Primary font content 

 Secondary font content

 Primary font content 

 Primary font content 

</body> </html>
<html> <body style="font-family:PrimaryFont">
 Primary font content 

 Secondary font content 

 Primary font content 

 Primary font content 

</body> </html>

Etc

Society

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Quotes

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Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March, 12, 2019