Kindle Scribe Best Practices

[tschucha]

Well I bit the bullet and ordered a Kindle Scribe this morning. That 10 inch 300DPI with a warmlight and $60 cheaper than the Kobo Elipsa 2E won me over.

I haven't been a Kindle User in 6 or 7 years now so I'll have to get back in the swing of things with the Kindle inteface.

Anyone have a list of best practices on the best ways to do things like minimize margins and line spacing (even further than allowed by the common methods), add additional fonts, display the book cover on the sleep screen, best practices involving charging -(run it down or keep it topped off) and anything else useful you might know of.

On the kobo they have a thing called devmode where you can access several other features - anything similar on Kindle?

On Kobo there is an editable configuration file - does one exist on the Kindle?

What do you Kindle folks do to your devices?

EDIT - My plan is to be converting my Kobo epub books to mobi format and transferring them to the Scribe via USB. The wifi will be turned off almost always. Is mobi the best amazon format to convert to? I really don't care about the notebook functionality or writing notes on books - just the basic ebook reading usability.

[HLS]

It is basically a giant oasis without buttons. same fonts, spacing ... etc. same settings. You have templates for the notepads but you can't change line spacing on notepad. its fixed

[tekkasit]

The Kindle Scribe is quite limited in terms of customizable options compared to Kobo devices.

What Scribe catch up:
- Side-loaded fonts are supported.
- Scribe also has the "Display Cover" option.

What options you will be missing:
- There are 14 pre-defined font sizes. Not configurable.
- For margin and line spacing options, they offer three values. Also not configurable.

Tips:
- For new documents, better choose ePub instead of Mobi format. But as of now, Kindle doesn't recognize ePub files natively. You need to convert it either through Calibre or Amazon's Send to Kindle service.
- Amazon's Send to Kindle service has support for EPUB files, however, it still assumes ISO-8859-1 encoding if no encoding is specified, while others assume UTF-8. This creates malformed formatting errors for special characters in many ePub files. https://kindle-epub-fix.netlify.app/

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by tschucha

Well I bit the bullet and ordered a Kindle Scribe this morning. That 10 inch 300DPI with a warmlight and $60 cheaper than the Kobo Elipsa 2E won me over.

I haven't been a Kindle User in 6 or 7 years now so I'll have to get back in the swing of things with the Kindle inteface.

Anyone have a list of best practices on the best ways to do things like minimize margins and line spacing (even further than allowed by the common methods), add additional fonts, display the book cover on the sleep screen, best practices involving charging -(run it down or keep it topped off) and anything else useful you might know of.

On the kobo they have a thing called devmode where you can access several other features - anything similar on Kindle?

On Kobo there is an editable configuration file - does one exist on the Kindle?

What do you Kindle folks do to your devices?

EDIT - My plan is to be converting my Kobo epub books to mobi format and transferring them to the Scribe via USB. The wifi will be turned off almost always. Is mobi the best amazon format to convert to? I really don't care about the notebook functionality or writing notes on books - just the basic ebook reading usability.

Sadly most of what you want is only available for those who jailbreak their Kindles and the Scribe comes with firmware that does not—yet—have a jailbreak. The difference between an open system and a walled garden.

As for charging? Best practice for Li-ion batteries is to let them discharge down to 20% and then recharge them to 80%. Unfortunately, most ereaders do not have accurate battery guages.

As for the best format? KF8/azw3 is the best format to convert to as it comes closest to epub. You can also do things like adding negative margins to the body tag to reduce those wide margins that Amazon seems to have an unnatural love for.

[tschucha]

Originally Posted by tekkasit

The Kindle Scribe is quite limited in terms of customizable options compared to Kobo devices.

What Scribe catch up:
- Side-loaded fonts are supported.
- Scribe also has the "Display Cover" option.

What options you will be missing:
- There are 14 pre-defined font sizes. Not configurable.
- For margin and line spacing options, they offer three values. Also not configurable.

Tips:
- For new documents, better choose ePub instead of Mobi format. But as of now, Kindle doesn't recognize ePub files natively. You need to convert it either through Calibre or Amazon's Send to Kindle service.
- Amazon's Send to Kindle service has support for EPUB files, however, it still assumes ISO-8859-1 encoding if no encoding is specified, while others assume UTF-8. This creates malformed formatting errors for special characters in many ePub files. https://kindle-epub-fix.netlify.app/

Currently I edit pretty much everything with Calibre book editor editing each book and using the fix all errors that the Calibre book editor finds. With Calibre it wouldn't be much trouble to convert them to MOBI or AZW3. I'd much prefer this method to having Amazon do the conversions and send them over the air.

I'm glad that the side-loaded fonts and display book cover options are now available. I'll have to get by with the margins and line heights. With the 10 inch screen there should be a lot more space so spreading out the words might not be much of a problem.

The weight of my Kobo Sage and cover is 390g now so the 433g weight should be a big adjustment.

[tschucha]

> You can also do things like adding negative margins to the body tag to reduce those wide margins that Amazon seems to have an unnatural love for.

Do you know the steps to take to automate this using Calibre? Right now I have added this code to the "Look and Feel" -> Styling tab for use on my Kobo trying to minimize the line height

body {
line-height: 0.9; /* or normal */ /* changed from 1.2 */
text-renderingptimizeLegibility
}

While searching for ways to do negative margins I found an old post saying:

Originally Posted by snoeki

I am looking for an option to convert my epub collection to azw3 and I would like to get negative margins for my kindle paperwhite 1.

I do this now manually and I change the css to this :

p {
margin-left: -40px;
margin-right: -40px;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
text-indent: 1.2em
}

The margin-left and margin-right to -40px. I am looking for a way to do this when I convert the books to azw3 without having to change the css files manually.

The problems I get is that not all the css files are the same. Sometimes people use the p option and somtimes the div options or they put the margins in the body.

Is there a way to get this right while converting without doing anything manually?

If I add the margin-xxxx values to my existing css code would this do the trick?

[Quoth]

I remove all line-height entirely on any conversion on all ebooks using any format using the Remove Styles setting in Calibre conversion. You can convert to same format. Then font metrics set the default on larger text / headings anyway, but the Kindle has limited user line-height control and on some formats won't even let CSS set it less than 1.2em.
This is pointless:

body {
line-height: 0.9;
}

The margins are a big issue, but at least the CSS will be respected. I think I read that something like -1.5% (do check) works on most Kindles whereas using -40px or other absolute pixels needs to be different on different models.

[tomsem]

YMMV, but unless you are using very large text, there's no need to make margins smaller. You need to keep the lines of text from getting too long to be comfortable to read. I actually have them set to maximum, with text size 4. On smaller Kindles it was minimum with text size 2 or 3.

Hopefully an update will add ability for 2 column mode for at least landscape orientation.

[tschucha]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I remove all line-height entirely on any conversion on all ebooks using any format using the Remove Styles setting in Calibre conversion. You can convert to same format. Then font metrics set the default on larger text / headings anyway, but the Kindle has limited user line-height control and on some formats won't even let CSS set it less than 1.2em.
This is pointless:


The margins are a big issue, but at least the CSS will be respected. I think I read that something like -1.5% (do check) works on most Kindles whereas using -40px or other absolute pixels needs to be different on different models.

Then something like this added to my "Look and Feel" -> Styling tab should shrink the left & right margins and remove the line-heights?



body {
margin-left: -1.5%;
margin-right: -1.5%;
}

with the filter style information adding "line-height" to the Other CSS Properties text box at the bottom of the Styling tab window?

[fduniho]

Originally Posted by tschucha

add additional fonts

Just add ttf or otf fonts to the fonts/ folder. The more important thing to think about is how to choose your fonts. The Kindle has only two fonts that were designed for ereading (Bookerly and Amazon Ember), and the rest of them were designed for print. But many more fonts have been designed for computer screens, and a few have been designed for e-ink screens. So, it is worth looking into what else is available. For sans serif fonts, it's good to have fonts that distinguish between I, l, and 1 and between 0 and O. Some good ones that do this include Fira Sans, Lexend, and Rambla. For serif fonts, it's good to have some that were designed for legibility on computer screens. Some of my most used serif fonts include Georgia, Literata, and Lora. Of these, Literata was also designed for ereading. Many OS fonts were designed for legibility on computer screens. I already mentioned Georgia, which comes with Windows, and I often read with the Ubuntu font. There are also large collections of free fonts on the internet you can browse through to find fonts you like. When picking any font, you want to make sure that it supports regular, italic, bold, and bolditalic. So, avoid fonts with just one style.

Since I got my Scribe only just recently, my font recommendations are based mainly on my experience with the Paperwhite 5. On the Scribe, I tend to increase the font size to keep the lines from having too many letters. With the increased font size, different fonts might work better than the ones I've been using on the smaller device. For example, I've noticed that the sans serif font Radio Canada works well for reading on the Scribe.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by fduniho

Since I got my Scribe only just recently, my font recommendations are based mainly on my experience with the Paperwhite 5. On the Scribe, I tend to increase the font size to keep the lines from having too many letters. With the increased font size, different fonts might work better than the ones I've been using on the smaller device. For example, I've noticed that the sans serif font Radio Canada works well for reading on the Scribe.

This.

Scribe requires re-thinking 'what works best'.

We've all been subject to the limitations of small screens, and trying to make the best of them. But it's a tradeoff. Like living in a trailer instead of a house. Portable? yes. Livable? sure. Preferable? perhaps not.

Finally we have a high resolution large screen, and larger than most print book pages. It's more possible to replicate the look and feel of print books, including those with complex layout.

So I have moved into my new 'house'. Of course, there is still some construction underway, and I will still have uses for the 'trailer'.