Amazon and Google roll out new typefaces for e-readers

Amazon and Google are rolling out fresh typefaces for e-readers.

Amazon's updated Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader features a higher resolution screen and enhanced typography.

For typography fans, electronic books have long been the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. The fonts are uninviting. Jarring swaths of white space stretch between words. Absent are all the typesetting nuances of a fine print book.

Now Amazon and Google are doing something about it. Both companies have developed custom fonts specifically for e-books.

Amazon began rolling out its font, Bookerly, on the Fire tablet in December and added it to the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps in May. During the next few weeks, Amazon will send out Bookerly in an update to Kindles.

The company has been trumpeting its more-readable font while promoting the newest Kindle Paperwhite (which is less expensive and more popular than the highly praised deluxe model, Kindle Voyage.) The new Paperwhite is out next week.

Meanwhile, in May Google introduced a quirky typeface, Literata, on its e-book platform, Google Play Books.

To showcase the fonts, the companies offered up excerpts from Ulysses, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Glass Mag­ician by Charlie N. Holmberg.

The upgrades aren’t just aesthetic. Typography can affect how fast you read. Some fonts propel the eye forward; others cause fatigue. Using eye-tracking tests, Amazon determined that its new font, Bookerly, allows readers to progress 2 per cent faster than its previous default, the clunky but well-performing workhorse font Caecilia.

Bookerly has received positive reviews but the typography world is even more excited about something else Amazon is releasing at the same time: new software that dictates how text appears on the page. This is the company’s first crack at introducing hyphenation — splitting a word in two to fit more characters on a line and eliminate the wide spaces that occur when there are too few words on a full-justified line.

The new layouts also include the kind of aesthetic details that make a typographer’s heart sing: perfectly aligned drop caps (the giant letters at the beginning of chapters); adjusted spacing between characters; and ligatures, or links, between certain letters when they stand side by side.

“For so long it was this wasteland of type aesthetics,” says Charles Nix, a senior designer at typeface producer Monotype. “Overall, it just looks more ­bookish.”

The new page look is available for most Amazon bestsellers and the company is working on adding it to more titles, a spokeswoman says. Google also is looking at introducing hyphenation.

The two companies took decidedly different approaches. Both wanted fonts that evoked book typography and felt comfortable for hours of reading. They had to work on a range of devices, screen sizes and resolutions, from e-readers to phones and tablets.

“A big challenge — but also one of the benefits of reading on Kindle — is that readers can customise the font size,” says Kathryn Abel, a senior project manager at Kindle who oversaw Bookerly’s development. She said her team designed Bookerly to be readable in small point sizes, and, when enlarged, to show off details such as the bottom of the letter k, the opening of the c and the bottom loop of the a.

For its part, Google sought something unique to brand its e-book platform. “I wanted something really distinctive and custom for Play Books, something with a little personality, something with a sparkle,” says Addy Beavers, user-experience designer for Google Play.

Google Play Books is Google’s e-bookstore, available in more than 65 countries and featuring five million titles. Google Play is used widely on Android devices and is available on Apple devices and on the web.

Beavers commissioned TypeTogether, a firm based in the Czech Republic, to design Literata. The typeface has raised some eyebrows because of its unusual italics, which are upright and calligraphic rather than slanted. Its regular letters also have quirks, such as a long, curvy tail on the capital Q. Literata replaces the Google Play Books default font, Droid Serif, which was designed for Android devices.

“The typeface that they were using before was a bit too static for long-term reading,” says Veronika Burian, co-founder and partner of TypeTogether. She says the upright italics were designed to be distinctive and to fit into the pixel grid, avoiding the lack of clarity that sometimes comes with digital renderings of slanted italics. Because they aren’t used as often, italics were an area in which the design team could let loose, she says. “We tried more crazy stuff, which in the end was just too much,” she says.

Typographers have given Bookerly high marks, calling it humanistic, friendly and a significant improvement over its predecessor, Caecilia, a journeyman default that was legible on early, low-resolution Kindles. Bookerly’s notable features include its curves and its serifs, which become thicker from left to right, leading the eye forward.

For many readers these subtleties may not be noticeable — until they upgrade to a higher-resolution device. “All of the angels dancing on the head of a pin — whether Bookerly is better than Caecilia — is lost on a large portion of the population,” Nix says.