Amazon today announced a new waterproof Kindle, and they also announced some new typography features that will roll out to devices from 2013 and later.
- New Font Size and Bold Settings: Now choose from more font sizes than ever before–and five levels of boldness–for whichever font you choose to read with. Combined with the new, 7-inch Paperwhite display, you can personalize your books so it’s perfectly comfortable for your eyes.
- New Accessibility Options: In addition to the OpenDyslexic font, we’ve added a feature to invert black and white on the display if you have light sensitivity. The new enlarged display option also lets you increase the size of items like the text on the home screen and library as well as the book icons to make the all-new Kindle Oasis easier to read.
- Ragged Right Alignment: You can now read using left-aligned (ragged right) text.
Amazon says:
Starting today, the new size and bold settings as well as ragged right alignment will be delivered as a free, over-the-air update to Kindle Paperwhite (Gen 6 released in 2013), plus all newer Kindle devices.
These are good changes. I prefer reading on my iPad mini, in part because it has more font sizes. If I try to make the font on my Kindles big enough, it’s too big; this means there will be not only more fonts in between those sizes (sort of largish and very large), and different weights, making it a lot better for each reader to find their optimal font.