I’ve long lamented the lack of fonts available on Kindle devices and apps. When Amazon released the excellent Kindle Voyage, they didn’t make any changes to the typography to take advantage of the better display.
Amazon has finally added a new font to the Kindle app for iOS. Called Boookerly, this serif font is quite attractive, and is a great addition to the app. This font will be the default font, if you accept it when you launch the app, replacing the slab font Caecilia.
While this font is only available in the Kindle iOS app, it will be rolled out to Kindle eink devices in the summer. Amazon is also deploying more typographical changes, adding a new layout engine, and offering hyphenation (though it won’t be a user option; it’ll be on for all).
Apparently, this requires that Amazon update book files to take advantage of the new font and layout engine, so I assume this means that you’ll need to re-download any books you have that are updated for this purpose (unless Amazon updates them automatically, pushing the new versions to devices).Here’s a page of a book on my iPad in Bookerly, then in Caecilia. I’ve shrunk the images a bit so they aren’t too large.
The difference is subtle, but if you pull back and look at them, you can see that the page with Bookerly is a bit lighter, which takes away that bulky feel you get when reading with Cecelia. This will be more noticeable on Kindle eink devices, where Cecelia is a bit weightier.