Quote:
Originally Posted by CyberPaul
Introducing a new format just to hyphenate or to introduce kerning and drop caps is simply crazy!
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We will probably never know all of the reasons behind KFX becoming the new kindle e-book format, but it seems clear that the enhanced typesetting features were only a part of it.
It appears that KFX was originally developed to support interactive magazines on Fire tablets and the earliest renderer release I have found was late 2013. I don't know whether the original plan was to expand its use to e-books or if that came later.
For some reason there was always fragmentation in the software for KF8 rendering. The Kindle for iOS app was a special case with a different renderer. With KFX the same rendering codebase is used for all platforms, including iOS. This creates more consistency across reading devices.
It also seems that the performance of the KF8 rendering engine was a factor in preventing the addition of new features. The KFX renderer is much more efficient. It is not based on HTML and so eliminates all of the processing needed to parse HTML and handle the complexities of CSS. KFX instead uses more primitive rendering instructions that are derived from the HTML source by Amazon's servers when the book is received from the publisher.
The new features that have been enabled by KFX have mostly been things that would have been too slow if done in the KF8 renderer. More complex typography and rendering multiple pages quickly for page flip and fast page turns would not have been possible with the old renderer on kindle devices.
Another improvement is that the features of KFX are designed to be added to incrementally. If a particular book uses a new KFX feature that is not supported by a particular device then that book is delivered in KF8 format instead as a fallback. This makes KFX a good platform for Amazon to use to experiment with new e-book ideas.
They have added features that are not possible to do in HTML and so might have been a challenge to implement in the KF8 renderer. For example, the Kindle in Motion titles have reflowable text which wraps around arbitrarily shaped objects.
KFX also includes a new, currently uncracked, DRM scheme. They probably consider that to be a plus even though is is easily worked around for now by using older formats.