Creating ebooks for different e-reading devices
by Allison Horton on
Not every e-reading device supports certain styling features, some of which you might heavily rely on when formatting your manuscript. The below chart covers how the major e-readers render common styling elements. If omitting any of these is a dealbreaker, consider tweaking your manuscript to ensure top-notch quality across all devices.
Renders on: | iPad/epub | Nook/epub | eInk Kindle/Mobi | Kindle Fire/KF8 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Typography | |||||
Typeface | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Type size | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Line height | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Color | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Background color | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
Highlight | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Alignment | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
First line indent | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Space between paragraphs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Bold/Italic | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Spacing | |||||
Above | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Below | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Left | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Right | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
Lines/Borders | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
Effects | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
Text wrapping | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
Drop shadow | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
Rounded corners | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
One Kindle-specific formatting note:
- The eInk Kindles cannot float images.