MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Where is the enhanced typesetting update?

mandy314 · 07-23-2015, 02:32 AM

Not the finest hour of Amazon's marketing imho. Here in Germany the pre-release announcement touted the PW3 with its "book-like" reading experience - you know, "paper-white" and "book-like". This was picked up by the media. Most did a "copy and paste" job, but some tried to explain the revolutionary new typesetting engine, which was funny in most cases. Amazon's info pages were changed every other day iirc. At first you could get the impression of Amazon having "invented" kerning, ligatures, hyphenation with this new Bookerly font - at the end you learned that "coming soon" for the device was different from "coming soon" for the typesetting lark.

Furthermore - uncommon for new Kindles the PW3 hit retail shops within days of the net release. And there were/are quite visible (but somewhat darkish) Kindle ads on the street and in newspapers etc.

So what? I can see Mono/Linotype not being amused; the fonts they have on the PW support kerning/ligatures out of the box. The OSS libs Amazon's rendering engines are build around can handle all the "new" features for years. So what is Amazon doing - "working hard" at this revolutionary typesetting engine (and re-processing ebooks in the process)? I really don't know. The Fire device and the iOS app were used for beta testing - it seems. But the users are more or less quiet concerning the "book-like" experience.

Now we are more than three weeks past the PW3 release. High time to put in my piece of speculation. So here it is: we won't see any new Kindle devices this year. Instead there will be a big firmware rollout in the fall with all the new typesetting features. And they will be breath-taking...

07-23-2015, 02:32 AM	#4
mandy314 Connoisseur Posts: 71 Karma: 200092 Join Date: Mar 2014 Device: kindle pw1	Not the finest hour of Amazon's marketing imho. Here in Germany the pre-release announcement touted the PW3 with its "book-like" reading experience - you know, "paper-white" and "book-like". This was picked up by the media. Most did a "copy and paste" job, but some tried to explain the revolutionary new typesetting engine, which was funny in most cases. Amazon's info pages were changed every other day iirc. At first you could get the impression of Amazon having "invented" kerning, ligatures, hyphenation with this new Bookerly font - at the end you learned that "coming soon" for the device was different from "coming soon" for the typesetting lark. Furthermore - uncommon for new Kindles the PW3 hit retail shops within days of the net release. And there were/are quite visible (but somewhat darkish) Kindle ads on the street and in newspapers etc. So what? I can see Mono/Linotype not being amused; the fonts they have on the PW support kerning/ligatures out of the box. The OSS libs Amazon's rendering engines are build around can handle all the "new" features for years. So what is Amazon doing - "working hard" at this revolutionary typesetting engine (and re-processing ebooks in the process)? I really don't know. The Fire device and the iOS app were used for beta testing - it seems. But the users are more or less quiet concerning the "book-like" experience. Now we are more than three weeks past the PW3 release. High time to put in my piece of speculation. So here it is: we won't see any new Kindle devices this year. Instead there will be a big firmware rollout in the fall with all the new typesetting features. And they will be breath-taking...