Amazon Guidelines

Publishing on Kindle: Guidelines for Publishers
Features & Benefits Supported
on Kindle
e Inkbased
Device
Full support for CSS to enable publishers to
control all elements of the text layout, including
line spacing, alignment, justification, margin,
color, style, & border.
Support for drop cap character at the beginning
of paragraphs.
Supported on
Kindle
Applications for
PC, Mac,
Android,
Windows Phone
No No Yes
No No Yes
Support for floating elements that includes
boxed text, callouts, sidebars, & images with
text wrapping.
No No Yes
Support for numbered and bulleted lists. No No Yes
Support for nested tables and merged cells
required by technical and textbooks.
No No Yes
Support for background images on pages and
for text on background images.
No No Yes
Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) No No Yes
that can be zoomed without loss of fidelity.
Support for embedded fonts that allows
publishers to have a custom look & feel for the
book.
No No Yes
Support for rounded corners of boxed elements. No No Yes
Support for drop shadow. No No Yes
Support for outline text. No No Yes
Support for multiple and repeated background
images.
No No Yes
Support for color gradient. No No Yes
Enables fine-grained control of attributes for text
and other elements through CSS selectors.
No No Yes
Support for fixed-layout pages for specified No No Yes
screen sizes.
Supported on
Kindle Fire
Tablet
There are important differences between writing HTML for websites and for Kindle books. To provide a
good reading experience, many website design practices should be avoided when creating Kindle books.
Refer to the following sections for more information.
Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Text
The Kindle family of devices has limited support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text. The Kindle
Readers for e Ink devices and applications can render horizontal left to right Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean text. They have limited font support for the CJK characters. There is no support for right to left
vertical scripts and no support for Japanese Ruby script.
3.1 Text Guidelines
3.1.1 Text Guideline #1: Normal Text Must Use Defaults
The normal text in a Kindle book must be all defaults. Amazon encourages content creators to use
creative styles for headings, special paragraphs, footnotes, tables of contents, etc., but not for normal
text. The reason for this is that any styling on normal text in the HTML would override the user’s preferred
default reading settings. Users report such behavior as a poor reading experience. Here are the most
important points:
• Normal text must not have a forced alignment (such as left aligned or justified).
• Normal text must use the default font size. Normal text should not use the
tag or its equivalent in CSS.
Kindle Publishing Guidelines Amazon.com 9