Publishing on Kindle: Guidelines for Publishers
Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Text
Kindle devices newer than and including the Paperwhite and Fire HD support right to left vertical scripts and Japanese Ruby script. Older e Ink and tablet devices are limited to horizontal left to right Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean text.
3.1 Text Guidelines
3.1.1 Text Guideline #1: Body Text Must Use Defaults
The body text in a reflowable Kindle book (fiction and non-fiction) must be all defaults. Amazon encourages content creators to use creative styles for headings, special paragraphs, footnotes, tables of contents, etc., but not for body text. 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 <font size=”…”>
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..
3.1.2 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 pagebreak-after
attributes.
3.1.3 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 <p> tag. For example:
• <p style=”text-indent:0"> - no indentation of the first line
• <p style=”text-indent:10%"> - positive indent, 10% of the width of the page
• <p style=”text-indent:5em"> - positive indent, 5 em
To change the space before each paragraph, use the margin-top style on the <p> tag.
Kindle Publishing Guidelines Amazon.com 11
