Anyway, I’m sure Amazon care about their typography just as much as anyone else. No doubt they are aware of the importance of getting it right. The choices they made, I think, can’t be down to ‘not caring’. For instance, Amazon wanted their ereader to be as accessible to the general public as possible. Geeks of various disciplines (tech geeks, type geeks, etc) aren’t really in the majority, so when making an accessible device, choices have to be made, and options got rid of. As I’m sure you’re aware, for the majority of cases justified text tends to be the better choice for large amounts of text, nicely leading your eye with the flow, hence why it’s used in most books (remember, emulating books is the Kindle’s biggest goal). While type geeks may know when ragged right text would be preferable, most people don’t. You seemingly being one of those type geeks, I understand why you’d want that ability. But when trying to minimise the complexity of the Kindle, I can see why the developer didn’t offer that function.

I understand your points, the Kindle’s typography could be a bit better in some cases, but this comes from how the Kindle has to take a generic ebook that could be displayed on a device of any size and attempt to format it on the fly. Real books can get the proper attention paid to them, because it’s known to the editor in charge the final size, so decisions can then be made. But the Kindle has to try to figure this out itself, which obviously isn’t an easy task.

So trying to figure out solutions to typographical problems on the fly all while trying not to have to involve the user is more likely the source of the errors, as opposed to it being about the developers not caring about typography.

Personally, taking the issues into account, I think they’ve done a rather good job of it so far, and good things are hopefully to come with the Kindle 3.

Again, apologies for my first post. I see your points, but I think you’re perhaps being a bit overly critical of the developers and overlooking their struggles.

Oh and yes, colour e-ink displays are a very exciting prospect, something I personally can’t wait to be introduced.

It’s true. Most e-readers do a crappy job displaying text. It’s not something you expect from a company like Amazon, though. It’s a technological (algorithmic) problem, sure, but it’s also a problem of caring about typography. Also, someone made a choice (in my opinion, a bad one) to justify all text on the Kindle by default, with no option to run ragged right text. (Kindle 2 seems to have taken note of this and addressed the problem of rivers by limiting the inter-word space to no more than an em width (Macintouch).

Thanks for the corrections, though. You’re right. The Kindle has a resolution of 167ppi. The first Kindle (which I was referring to) had 4 levels of gray. And the “pixel molecules” I was referring to are the microcapsules (one side black, the other white) that are used in e-ink technology.

This is why I was skeptical about e-ink’s ability to create true grays, because the only actual colors it has at its disposal are black and white. I believe ereaders “fake” different levels of gray by varying the concentration of these black and white microcapsules.

They are, however, working on color e-ink displays:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/blackandwhite_ebooks/

A few mistakes:
- the Kindle has a resolution 167ppi.
- It also has 16 levels of grey, not ‘black and white’.
- ‘I bet the image format on the Kindle is BMP.’ – Nope, doesn’t support them.
- The ‘So, what happened to the text on the way to the Kindle?’ is all conjecture. And wrong; they do scan them.
- And what the hell are ‘pixel molecules’?

You make far too many assumptions here, not enough research with nothing to back up your statements apart from your own seemingly misinformed interpretations of ‘good’ typography.

Cheers,
Tom