JANE EYRE on the KINDLE APP FOR ANDROID

The trouble with e-book design is that quite often, it’s not the e-book’s design you are seeing: yes, formatting errors can make a book unreadable, but if an e-book is cleanly formatted and has no or few images, then, depending on your reader, you can practically redesign it yourself.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app on my phone. It’s not ideal to read from: the screen is small and back-lit, and I’m forever bumping the screen the wrong way and having to scroll back to my place. Nevertheless, the app provides quite a few options for redesigning an e-book’s text to better fit your device.

Some design elements are immovably formatted into the e-book. For this version of Jane Eyre (which I ‘purchased’ for free from Amazon), these include the cover, line and section breaks, chapter headings, and indented paragraphs.

Jane Eyre, all alone in my Kindle library

Here is the cover of Jane Eyre as it appears on my phone. As this is a free version of the book the cover is one of Amazon’s default templates. It is too small for me to read the text at the very bottom, but the title and author name are clear (on my phone, if not in this photograph). The cover is only available to view in this thumbnail form. A successful e-book cover must be visually effective and able to communicate all necessary information even when seen very small; plain as it is, this cover succeeds, though I would prefer a more decorative one.

A chapter heading and new paragraph, in both portrait and
 landscape viewing modes

The image above shows how a new chapter and paragraph are treated on the app’s default mode. The e-book is designed with fluid text, so rather than beginning on a new ‘page’, the new chapter simply flows on from the previous one. To make the new chapter distinct, the e-book’s designer has set the chapter heading in bold all-caps with extra space below and above. There is more space above the chapter heading than below, indicating that it is attached to the following text block. This is a tidy, simple way of formatting a chapter heading for a digital book read on a non-dedicated device. If I were reading on a Kindle I might prefer the new chapter to begin on a new ‘page’, but I am glad it doesn’t here, since my phone’s screen is so small and I would not want to scroll more than I have to.

The first paragraph of a new chapter should not technically be indented, and would look better flush with the left margin.

The attributes of the text that I am able to change using the app are portrait/landscape format, background colour, text size, margin width, and leading. See the image above for an example of how a text appears in both portrait and landscape format. The measure can be further changed by altering the margin width.

From left to right, the three margin width options: narrow, medium, and wide

From left to right, three of the five available text size options:
smallest, medium, and largest. Note how the auto-justification
creates rivers in the largest text size example, and how the
automatic regular leading looks enormous on the smallest

From left to right, the three leading options applied to
the default medium-sized text: narrow, medium, and wide.
By combining margin width, text size, and leading, I
would be able to make up for a variety of formatting
failures in a purchased e-book

The three background colour options: white, sepia, and black
with white text

Overall this e-book is definitely fit for purpose, although there is no real innovation in the design. However, the plain design does give me free reign to use the app options to change some aspects of the appearance of the book to better suit my preferences, should I wish.

Samples collected: 1 July 2012