# Does anyone else default to publisher's font?



## Jodi O (Mar 3, 2010)

After 5 years of reading on the Kindle, I've finally realized that I'm tired of all my books looking exactly the same. That's very far from a paper reading experience, and maybe the only thing I miss. So, I'm now using Publisher Font as the default setting, which changes both the font and the spacing (a little).

I'm liking it. Does anyone else do this?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

That's an interesting idea!  No, I haven't tried it, and can't say that I've heard anyone mention it.  I might try it, just for fun!

Betsy


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## jlee745 (Jul 27, 2010)

How do choose that option.


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## Jodi O (Mar 3, 2010)

It's listed among the font options, under the "Aa" menu. 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Like Betsy said, what an interesting idea! I never thought of this. Thanks for the info!

L


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## Jodi O (Mar 3, 2010)

I never even noticed it was there, not until recently. I have no idea whether it was an option all along 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk


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## Patricia (Dec 30, 2008)

I'm trying it, too.  I never noticed it before.


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## hamerfan (Apr 24, 2011)

Ack! Not an option on my PW1. Maybe time for an upgrade.


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## John Hopper (Mar 31, 2013)

Most books don't have a publisher font option available,  but if it is there,  I use it. I think it's been around for a couple of years. 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

How do you do it? I would like to try reading Comic Scans font but I have no idea how I would do it. Where could I find the font to download? What program could I use for transferring the font to the Kindle?


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

The "Publisher Font" option has been around for a couple of years, but not all books have one embedded -- in general, it's something the publisher has to do. I generally do check to see if there is one and, unless it's sans serif type font, I will at least give it a try.  I've very much liked the newest font, Bookerly, for most reading, though.

I understand that, if a book has no DRM, you can add a 'publisher font' through Calibre somehow. I've no idea how because I don't use the program really at all -- only very occasionally for converting something to work on kindle -- and going to the trouble to learn how to add a font is more than I want to do. Laziness kicks in.


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## Andra (Nov 19, 2008)

I never thought of using the publisher font.  I think that is probably a throw-back to the terribly formatted books that we got in the early days where the font was part of the file and was usually unreadable.  I'm glad to hear it's working well for some people.
I like a san serif font so I'm probably in the minority.  I just want the words 


edit to fix spelling


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Doesn't the Kindle default to the publisher font for a new book even if you normally have Bookerly or whatever selected?


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Doesn't the Kindle default to the publisher font for a new book even if you normally have Bookerly or whatever selected?


Not that I've found. Books open on the regular default font. If the last font you used was a publisher font, and a new book doesn' t have one, it'll go to the most recently used device font.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Doesn't the Kindle default to the publisher font for a new book even if you normally have Bookerly or whatever selected?


I think what you're thinking of is a published overriding the user-defined font to require a specific font for the book, which may or may not be a publisher font--it could be one of the fonts already on the Kindle, I believe. This is not done often, and generally results in a lot of bad reviews. Which may be why it doesn't happen often. 

Betsy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> I think what you're thinking of is a published overriding the user-defined font to require a specific font for the book, which may or may not be a publisher font--it could be one of the fonts already on the Kindle, I believe. This is not done often, and generally results in a lot of bad reviews. Which may be why it doesn't happen often.
> 
> Betsy


Oh . . . yes . . . there have been cases where publishers 'locked' the font so that users can't change it to their preferred typeface. There have also been cases where the 'default' size was much larger or smaller than usual.

I think that when it HAS happened, it was an honest mistake on the part of the publisher and, as there is generally a great hue and cry and many complaints, the publisher usually fixes it pretty quickly.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> Oh . . . yes . . . there have been cases where publishers 'locked' the font so that users can't change it to their preferred typeface. There have also been cases where the 'default' size was much larger or smaller than usual.
> 
> I think that when it HAS happened, it was an honest mistake on the part of the publisher and, as there is generally a great hue and cry and many complaints, the publisher usually fixes it pretty quickly.


Well, if by "honest mistake" you mean that they didn't realize it would matter to readers or that they didn't realize readers wouldn't be able to override it, yes, I'll agree that it was an honest mistake. 

I think, in most cases, the publisher was making a decision to intentionally choose a font that they liked for the book, just as they would for a print book. They wanted the reader to read in that font--they just didn't realize that it would be an issue. After all, nobody ever returned a paper book because of the font.

We still see conversations occasionally in the Writers' Cafe about specifying a font for a book.

Betsy


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

It seems though for me, every time I tried the publisher font in some books, it is either a san serif font, which I can't read. So it just looks like the normal helvetica or its a serif that is on the list already, like caecelia. I haven't actually found one yet that uses a different font from the ones I can already choose from. I guess I didn't see the point then. 

I actually like the idea, as long as its not san serif and a font not one of my options already. So far I haven't come across a book like that though. Many books do not have the publisher font.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Well, if by "honest mistake" you mean that they didn't realize it would matter to readers or that they didn't realize readers wouldn't be able to override it, yes, I'll agree that it was an honest mistake.
> 
> I think, in most cases, the publisher was making a decision to intentionally choose a font that they liked for the book, just as they would for a print book. They wanted the reader to read in that font--they just didn't realize that it would be an issue. After all, nobody ever returned a paper book because of the font.
> 
> ...


It seems to me it was happening mostly when Amazon intrduced a new format and changed the procedure for properly converting the book file Kindle. So the publishers were doing what they'd done all along which left a generic bit of code that let the kindle user pick the font.

BUT, with the change, the publishers had to tick a box or untick a box or something to go with the generic code or, otherwise, the book would have the specified font. I expect it was a case of them hearing "hey, now you can specify a publisher font" without understanding that, "oh, by the way, you don't want to lock it in."

AND it's at least party Amazon's fault, in this scenario, if default used to mean 'user controlled' and then changed to 'lock it in'. That said, I also can imagine publishers not paying much attention to whatever new documentation for the conversion process they received: "oh, we've done this before, don't need to read no stinkin' instructions." 

I've not seen it as an issue since the _Casual Vacancy_ fiasco where the new JK Rowling book had a premium price and when folks got it they found that they were locked to a specific typeface and the default was teeny tiny -- meaning that anyone who used a mid-range font size had to go to the largest choice, and anyone who already used a larger option, couldn't make the print big enough to read at all. THAT got a lot of extremely negative publicity, was fixed pretty quickly, and the publishers suddenly found time to read the manuals. Or maybe Amazon switched the 'default' back.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Atunah said:


> It seems though for me, every time I tried the publisher font in some books, it is either a san serif font, which I can't read. So it just looks like the normal helvetica or its a serif that is on the list already, like caecelia. I haven't actually found one yet that uses a different font from the ones I can already choose from. I guess I didn't see the point then.
> 
> I actually like the idea, as long as its not san serif and a font not one of my options already. So far I haven't come across a book like that though. Many books do not have the publisher font.


I've seen ones that were serif fonts -- but nothing as nice as bookerly. Many do have sans serif fonts which I don't like either. There was one book I got that I'd actually already read in paper -- the paper book is wonderfully set up and laid out and when I saw 'publisher font' as an option on the eBook I thought they'd have used something similar to make the eBook as close to the paper edition as possible. But it was just some boring sans serif font.  There's a case where they totally missed an opportunity to make it special.


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## Andra (Nov 19, 2008)

The other thing I've seen is that sometimes the publishers obviously don't actually look at their books on a Kindle.  Several series that I read - Susan Wittig Albert's China Bayles for example - start each chapter with a special quote or fact.  In the print books these are laid out nicely and are easy to read.  On my Kindle not so much.  The fonts are all over the place and sometimes they are just images with the text in them.  So the spacing is weird and you can't change the size or anything.  At least once you get into the actual chapters of the story, things are more easy to read.


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

Looks like this option is only for the Voyage and Paperwhite 3 and up. Because I don't see publisher font in the Aa menu.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

MagicalWingLT said:


> How do you do it? I would like to try reading Comic Scans font but I have no idea how I would do it. Where could I find the font to download? What program could I use for transferring the font to the Kindle?


To use Comic Sans as the font in a book put the book into the freeware program Calibre. This won't work if the book has DRM.

Once in Calibre click Convert and pick the format you want to convert it to, usually Mobi or AZW3 for a Kindle. It can stay in the same format if you like or you can choose any format you prefer. Then in the bar on the left of the conversion page click Look and Feel. Then click the drop-down "Font Type" and it'll list all the fonts on your computer, usually a LOT of them. On a Windows computer Comic Sans will be in that list if you haven't removed it from Windows. I don't know about Macs or Linux computers.

Select that font or whatever font you prefer and let it do the conversion.

Then plug in your Kindle to the computer and on Calibre's top menu tell it to send it to that device. That's it.

On the Kindle open the book, tap the Aa icon and select Publisher Font and read your book in Comic Sans. Or at least read as much of it as you can stand in Comic Sans. 

Barry


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

MagicalWingLT said:


> Looks like this option is only for the Voyage and Paperwhite 3 and up. Because I don't see publisher font in the Aa menu.


It depends on the book . . . not all books have a publisher font available. I know it's been an option for a while; I'm not sure how new a kindle it has to be for the software to allow it.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> It depends on the book . . . not all books have a publisher font available. I know it's been an option for a while; I'm not sure how new a kindle it has to be for the software to allow it.


My Kindle Keyboard has Publisher Font as an option (I only checked one book).

Mike


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

Thanks barryem! I'll be trying this tonight 
Edit: Well I tried it on a few books that were DRM free and it doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...


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## kalyy (Apr 13, 2016)

MagicalWingLT said:


> Thanks barryem! I'll be trying this tonight
> Edit: Well I tried it on a few books that were DRM free and it doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...


Did you tried with azw3? I remember reading embedding fonts doesn't work with mobi.


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## Meemo (Oct 27, 2008)

You won't see a "Publisher Font" unless the publisher has embedded a specific font.  So you can't really tell by looking at just a book or two.  You can get a Publisher Font on the PW2, I know for sure.  It's what I have right now, and I embed a font in all my books using Calibre, and they always show up.  

And Barry is right - the conversion has to be to AZW3 format for the Publisher Font to work.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

MagicalWingLT said:


> Thanks barryem! I'll be trying this tonight
> Edit: Well I tried it on a few books that were DRM free and it doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...


Sorry. I made a wrong assumption. You can't do this if you convert to Mobi because, I think, Mobi isn't able to contain a publisher's font. I am sure you can't do it with Mobi. I'm guessing at that reason.

When I posted the instructions I loaded Calibre and just made sure I had the right titles to click. I didn't actually do it. Now I just did it, converting to AZW3 and it works just fine.

Comic Sans is a bit ugly however. You might not like the result. 

I have done this a time or two in the past. A couple of times I've bought books from Amazon with pretty ugly fonts. I probably converted them to epub for my Kobo or I would have known that it wouldn't work on Mobi. Or maybe I did convert to AZW3 those times but I usually use Mobi.

Barry


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

Thanks guys. I'll try it with Azw3 tonight and see what happens


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

I just tried this with a book on my Paperwhite 1 which doesn't have either Bookerly or Ember fonts.  I converted the book twice, once with Bookerly and once with Ember and then took a look.

I usually use Bookerly on my Voyage, not for any real reason, but when it became available I tried it and it was okay and I never bothered to switch back to Caecilia.  I liked Caecilia a bit better but not enough to matter.

Anyway on the PW1 Bookerly seems a bit fainter than on the Voyage but the difference is small enough I can't really be sure of that.  Maybe it is.  Maybe it's my imagination.

The one converted to the Ember font also looked fainter than what I'm used to with Caecilia and, of course, there are no serifs.  I prefer serifs but again, not that much.  I could be comfortable with any of these.

I read paperbacks all my life and I'm pretty sure those all had different fonts and different size fonts and I never really cared.  Come to think of it I can't recall anyone else ever caring with a few exceptions when people had vision problems.  But now everyone cares since we can control the fonts a bit.  Technology makes us fussy. 

Anyway it's simple enough to do.  I took an epub book and converted it to AZW3, changing the font before it converted it in Calibre.  It's only one very small, simple step added to the normal conversion process.  I suppose I could do the same with any font installed on my computer.

I remember reading on Mobilereads forum about some custom versions of some of the Kindle and Kobo fonts that some of the members there had made bolder.  I think I downloaded on on my Kobo at one time and tried it but I don't remember if I liked it or not.  I never read that much with the Kobo so it was just for curiosity.

Now though I may look into those fonts again and see if they'll install as easily into Windows as these 2 fonts did, allowing me to convert books to read with bolder fonts on my Voyage.  That might be worth trying.

I also tried these books in Moon+ on my phone but it doesn't seem to support built-in fonts, or if it does I don't know where that option is.  I'm not sure I care since it has a lot of fonts to choose from already and I can control their boldness already.  I don't even know what font I use there.  It's whatever the default serif font is and it's set to bold.  I've always liked it.  But I probably will experiment with that because I'm curious.

Barry


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## Meemo (Oct 27, 2008)

barryem said:


> I remember reading on Mobilereads forum about some custom versions of some of the Kindle and Kobo fonts that some of the members there had made bolder. I think I downloaded on on my Kobo at one time and tried it but I don't remember if I liked it or not. I never read that much with the Kobo so it was just for curiosity.
> 
> Barry


That's where I got the font I use, "Charis SIL Compact 2". Someone had tweaked it to make it a bit bolder and optimize it for eInk. You don't really have to install it on the computer, you can install it right into Calibre itself. I do it in the "Convert books" area under Look & Feel, if you click on the font window, it will bring up a list of fonts and under it there's an icon to "Add Fonts". This is what the Charis looks like on my PW2. (The other one I tried that a mobilereads member had tweaked was "Deja Vu Serif E-Ink" - I like it a lot as well, but like Charis more.)









And this is the new Ember font.


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## Phantammeron (Apr 23, 2016)

I am not sure of this adds anything to the discussion of using Publisher font. Im a newbie....so my comments might be wrong. But I'm a former senior software engineer and have written a lot of web applications, having worked with fonts, design, and HTML styles for some time. I noticed that Amazon Kindle does what I have always done...designed their system around "default fonts" on the device and its browser first, then turned around and NOT encouraged authors to change the default layouts and fonts of their books from the default. I know seasoned Kindle book designers go past this and ignore this. That's fine.

But my point is, if you look at the wide variety of current and legacy display devices for eBooks now, the rational for NOT having more publishers and authors customize book layouts and fonts makes sense. You just cant have so many devices and screen sizes, yet have no "css standard" font and layout that works on all of them well. What that means is that many authors, like me, will continue not to use special fonts in their books, and design for a publisher font. It might not matter, as the text will get squeezed into the layout of the reader. But the way the whole eBook and Kindle system has been designed, the idea of using elegant fonts just may never work.....until this industry develops a standard and sticks to it. HTML 5 is a perfect example of a so-called standard that is still sub standard as its gone back and used some older deprecated code to accommodate older browsers and devices.....ie a bad idea compared to XHTML 2 in my opinion that would have forced every Internet device to use standard code.

Sadly, that means publishers on Kindles many devices can rarely control the display of their eBooks like they can print. And though readers choose fonts and hope for books where authors supply them, I just dont think you will be able to count on all your books to look great in any font other than default. Sure on the newer Kindles, with wider HD screens, its fine. But unless someone in the eBook industry comes out and develops a standard that encourages authors to embed their own custom fonts and layouts based on all the legacy devices, many of our books will stick with default fonts.


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## S.Reid (Dec 2, 2009)

I do when it's available.


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## kltmom (Jan 9, 2012)

I do, also for some variety.  There are some fonts I prefer, like Bookerly, Georgia, and Palatino, but whenever I open up a new book I default to the publisher's font first to try it out.  If I don't like it after adjusting the sizing, then I go back to one of my established favorites.


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