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Kindle Previewer 3 Lets You Experience Enhanced Typesetting

By 5 Comments

bookerly_c3

Amazon has just released Kindle Previewer 3. It allows authors and publishers to get a sense on how their e-books will look on Kindles and Fire tablets using the new typesetting engine.

Last year Amazon released a new font called Bookerly, which replaced Caecilia as the new default font for the Kindle Fire line of tablets and their fleet of apps. Bookerly is a serif style of font that has been custom-made by Amazon to be as readable across as many different types of screens as possible. Like Google’s Literata, Bookerly is meant to address many of the aesthetic issues surrounding e-book fonts. A few months after Bookerly was released Amazon sought to address the Kindle’s typesetting problems with an all-new layout engine that introduces better text justification, kerning, drop caps and image positioning.

When publishers and indie authors submit e-books to Amazon it was a total mystery how their titles would look using the new fonts and layout engine. This mystery should be dispelled with the advent of Kindle Previewer 3, a free tool for PC and MAC.

You can download Kindle Previewer 3 Beta from Amazon.

Michael Kozlowski

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

  • Chip Kerchner

    Does the new layout engine only work with Bookerly? I personally don’t use this font (it’s not to my taste) and I haven’t observed any noticeable differences with my Kindle Paperwhite 3.

  • lefrenchfab

    Just tried it. It’s very, very (veeeeeery) slow, on my Mac. I will not use it until a new beta, or the final version, proves to be a better performer. Basically, it is more efficient now, for me at least, to send the file I create with KindleGen to different devices via the Send to Kindle app.

  • Amazon only has a handful of fonts they employ across all of their hardware and apps. This new beta thing will display all of them, but i think the new type setting engine is the main attraction.