Online books retailer Amazon.com, Inc., US, has launched its next-generation file-format for Kindle books. Kindle Format 8 (KF8) will reportedly replace Mobi 7, and it brings support for HTML5 and CSS3. According to Amazon, this will enable publishers to create better-looking books with rich formatting, including fixed and floated elements, embedded fonts and drop-caps, text on background images, numbered and bulleted lists. In all, Amazon says KF8 has over 150 new formatting capabilities, which are outlined in full on its website.
Amazon cites a number of genres that will potentially benefit from the changes. It says technical and engineering books will be boosted by superior diagrams, through the use of CSS3 formatting, nested tables, boxed elements and SVG.
According to the company, forthcoming enhancements to Kindle Publisher Tools will make it easier and faster for publishers to create high quality Kindle books. KindleGen 2 seeks to create Kindle content from a wide variety of sources including HTML, XHTML and EPUB. Kindle Previewer 2 (available soon) provides an easy way for publishers to preview how titles will look on Kindle devices and apps.
In terms of support, Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet will be the first device to support the new format. However, the company promises support on its latest generation of e-ink Kindles ‘in the coming months’, along with its free Kindle apps for other platforms.
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