Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Amazon Has Developed a New e-Book Format called KFX

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A few months ago Amazon rolled out the Bookerly font to its line of iOS apps and the Kindle Paperwhite 3. This new font was exclusively developed for e-reading in mind. In order to really take advantage of the new format, Amazon had to develop a new e-book format. In the past they used AZW and MOBI for the standard book, but they new one is called KFX.

Amazon claims there are around 100,000 e-books on their website that their titles in the new KFX format. If you want to find out if a specific title will give you the optimal reading experience you look on the book's description page at Amazon. There's a new label that shows if enhanced typesetting has been enabled.

Here is the real kicker, many of the e-books you already have on your Kindle might show KFX on the product description page, but still is not providing you with the most robust experience. What you need to do, is delete the e-book on your Kindle and download it again. Your purchases are safely stored in the cloud, so you won’t lose access to them. Instead, you will simply download the book once again, but in the new Amazon KFX format.

What is a story about a new Kindle e-book format, if Good e-Reader did not provide a scoop. Here is the deal. Amazon has developed a tool that they are using in-house called kfxgen that they use to convert the old e-book format to the new one. Currently publishers don’t have a way to submit newer titles in KFX and the official Kindle Previewer tool does not support enhanced typesetting. Kindle for PC also does not include the new font, so if you decide you want to strip the DRM from your books, you will be unable to do so with KFX. Calibre, a preferred e-book management tool also does not have support for KFX either.

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OK, so what exactly is KFX and Bookerly? Many of you might be wondering. Basically, it is a new font and rendering engine that is supposed to give you a better reading experience. Many Kindle books in the past had weird spaces between words and when authors used hyphens. Sometimes it felt a little bit discombobulated when you were into a book and text “started to look like this” If you want to learn more about Bookerly, in a very scientific way, check out the advanced description HERE.

Kindle eBooks with Enhanced Typesetting Use New KFX Kindle Format

Yesterday Amazon released a major software update for their line of Kindle ebook readers. The update includes a new Bookerly font custom made for Kindles and a new typesetting and layout engine that adds things like hyphens, ligatures, and improved word spacing. One interesting detail to come out about the new layout engine is that […]

After Dark

Galleries are forbidden places once the lights are turned out at night. After Dark was a prize-winning installation from The Workers, a studio in East London, which wandered the empty Tate Modern and Tate Britain at night in London last year. With Raspberry Pi for brains.

You can learn more about the project at AfterDark.io. We wish we’d known about it when it was happening, but happily, there’s a chance that the robots will reappear in another gallery in the future; we’ll be keeping an eye on their website in case that happens.

(Space geeks should watch this one to the end; the first operator of the system once it went live was a certain Commander Hadfield.)

 

The post After Dark appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

New Bookerly Font Now Available on the Kindle Voyage

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Amazon developed a brand new font that was designed with e-readers in mind. It was chiefly made to replace Caecilia, which has been the default font to read on the entire line of Kindles for the last four years. If you have the Kindle Voyage, now is the time to rejoice.  The Bookerly font is now available to download via a wireless update.

If you have an older Kindle e-readers, the Bookerly font has also been given the all clear from Amazon. There are firmware updates now available for the Kindle Touch, Kindle 7th gen and previous-gen Kindle Paperwhite. If you haven’t downloaded it automatically, check out the Amazon manual update page for further instructions.