Vertical Paper

Amazon’s bad update to the Kindle app for iPad

Daily Exhaust:

Having ample margins helps the eye flow over the text and makes it easier to move from one line to the next while reading. Making the margins smaller in the app hinders the ease with which the eye can move over the page, making the book harder to read, not easier. Also, it’s just ugly.

I couldn’t agree more. It seems such a good idea to get rid of the margins and to fit as much text on a page as possible. After all, all people care about is the text, right? Wrong. Margins are absolutely vital for good readability. They help the reader to focus and also provide a natural frame for the text. And book designers knew this already more than 500 years ago. Come on Amazon, you tried it and it didn’t not work. Now please change it back to what it was. And one more thing — please improve your proofreading. Too many of the ebooks I bought from you have typos in them. Not good!