As the Kindle Fire tablet, powered by Android is about to arrive in the US market, Amazon has come out with the announcement of a new e-book format, called Kindle Format 8 (KF8) which takes advantage of the HTML 5 technology. The idea of HTML5 based ebooks is not new, as the current e-book formats such as EPUB, Mobipocket, and even the current Kindle format are a variation of HTML in one way or the other.
In the existing formats, the publishers don’t have control over fonts, text formatting or even layout. This makes it difficult for the children’s or even technical publishers to base their books on them. PDF formats are better for the purpose, but once these files are created, they cannot be made to reflow the e-book contents according to the users’ needs.
In the new Kindle Format 8, all the advanced HTML5 features such as CSS3 formatting, embedded fonts, borders are all supported and then there are richer layout options to make reproduction of children’s books easier than ever. The first device to support the new format will be Kindle Fire, but the support for the same will be extended across other latest Kindles and Kindle apps for smartphones and tablets as well.
Amazon talks about Kindle Format 8 in its site, “As showcased on Kindle Fire, KF8 enables publishers to create great-looking books in categories that require rich formatting and design such as children’s picture books, comics & graphic novels, technical & engineering books and cookbooks. Kindle Format 8 replaces the Mobi format and adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics, opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love.”