AZW3 justified - ragged right

[j.p.s]

The AZW3 of The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis is ragged right.

Since the ragged right Alignment page option is grayed out for AZW3 I've always assumed Kindles will always display AZW3 justified. So it looks like justification for AZW3 is a function of the book. Is this an attribute that is set in the AZW3 or is it done in the source CSS or HTML?

(I assume the ragged right in The 2020 Commission Report ... is in keeping with the government report conceit.)

[jhowell]

The default for KF8 (azw3) is justified text. For KFX format the reader can select either justified or left aligned (ragged right).

You can force align left using css/styles, but that is discouraged by the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines:

The body text in a reflowable Kindle book (fiction and non-fiction) must be all defaults. Amazon encourages content creators to use creative styles for headings, special paragraphs, footnotes, tables of contents, etc., but not for body text. For guidance on using embedded fonts, refer to section 9.3.8. The reason for this is that any styling on body text in the HTML will override the user’s preferred default reading settings. Users report such behavior as a poor reading experience.

I took a look at the free sample of the book you mentioned and the css stylesheet has the following:

p {
  margin:0;
  text-indent:0em;
  text-align:left;
  widows:2; 
  orphans:2;
}

So definitely forced left aligned.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The AZW3 of The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis is ragged right.

Since the ragged right Alignment page option is grayed out for AZW3 I've always assumed Kindles will always display AZW3 justified. So it looks like justification for AZW3 is a function of the book. Is this an attribute that is set in the AZW3 or is it done in the source CSS or HTML?

(I assume the ragged right in The 2020 Commission Report ... is in keeping with the government report conceit.)

Report it to them. I'd encourage you to use the contact button to do so--in my experience, if you simply report errors or formatting through the "report formatting errors" option, nothing happens. If you contact them via customer service and tell them how crappy the reading experience is, they take action. Forcing someone to read ragged-right--which cannot be overridden--is just wrong. Leaving the alignment unset allows those users who have devices that allow overriding to do so.

Hitch

[HarryT]

I must confess that my "inner heretic" still finds it easier to write "<p align="center"> or "<p align="left/right"> for the occasional centred or ragged right/left paragraph.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jhowell

The default for KF8 (azw3) is justified text. For KFX format the reader can select either justified or left aligned (ragged right).

You can force align left using css/styles, but that is discouraged by the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines...

I took a look at the free sample of the book you mentioned and the css stylesheet has the following:

So definitely forced left aligned.

Thanks.

In this case, I think the author has a legitimate reason to publish the book ragged right. It is unfortunate that this can not be overridden, even when the book is in KFX. I suspect that this is laziness on Amazon's part since they make provisions to override publisher fonts. Overriding alignment must be easier. They really should have three page options, book default, justified, and left aligned, and provide that for both KF8 and KFX. (Of course, if the book specified alignment varies with section or paragraph, user specified forced alignment might give strange results.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Report it to them. I'd encourage you to use the contact button to do so--in my experience, if you simply report errors or formatting through the "report formatting errors" option, nothing happens. If you contact them via customer service and tell them how crappy the reading experience is, they take action. Forcing someone to read ragged-right--which cannot be overridden--is just wrong. Leaving the alignment unset allows those users who have devices that allow overriding to do so.

Hitch

I agree that body text should very nearly always be all defaults, but for this book, I think it is a legitimate choice to publish it ragged right. (Of course, it should be possible to override alignment.)

What really ticks me off is when a publisher specifies font height for body text. There is just no legitimate reason for doing that. Even though it is possible for the user to change text height, that is no justification for a publisher gratuitously making that specification.

As to contacting CS, I had a strongly negative experience over several weeks involving multiple chat sessions and emails with multiple reps that completely soured my outlook on resolving anything other than open and shut problems via CS.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I agree that body text should very nearly always be all defaults, but for this book, I think it is a legitimate choice to publish it ragged right. (Of course, it should be possible to override alignment.)

What really ticks me off is when a publisher specifies font height for body text. There is just no legitimate reason for doing that. Even though it is possible for the user to change text height, that is no justification for a publisher gratuitously making that specification.

As to contacting CS, I had a strongly negative experience over several weeks involving multiple chat sessions and emails with multiple reps that completely soured my outlook on resolving anything other than open and shut problems via CS.

Your choice, but the PG are pretty clear--doing that is a direct violation of them. So...that's not going to be overridable any time soon. The only way to keep the power in the hands of the buyer is NOT to set the alignment.

And while, sure, CS at Amazon--at any company that is large, and outsources, for that matter--can be at best frustrating, IME on this particular issue, they are reasonably responsive.

Hitch