One of the big advantages of an e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle – apart from being able to carry hundreds of books with you in one small, portable device – is being able to change how the font and words appear on the page.
With physical books, you get what’s printed and that’s it. But, if you have a Kindle, you can choose from any number of fonts, and change thickness, size and spacing, until the layout on the page suits you.
In this guide we’ll show you how it’s done, and regardless of whether you have a basic Kindle, the Kindle Paperwhite, an Oasis or a Scribe, the process is the same.
How to change fonts on Kindle
Changing your font style, size and thickness is really easy on Kindle. The first step is opening the book that you’re reading. Make sure it’s a text-based book you’ve downloaded from Amazon’s Kindle store and not a graphic novel or other document style. Then go through the following steps:
- Tap the screen in the top 1/3rd, or near the top edge
- Select the ‘Aa’ icon
- On the pop-up window make sure the ‘Font’ tab is selected
- Tap ‘Font family’
- Now choose your preferred font style.
Once you’ve got the style you want, you’ll want to change the size and thickness to your preference too. To do that, just tap the back arrow next to ‘Font family’.
To increase or decrease the thickness tap the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icons in the ‘Bold’ row. To increase or decrease the text size just tap the ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icons in the ‘Size’ row.
After that you can customise the spacing and style further by selecting the ‘Layout’ tab and choosing how wide you want the margins to be on either side of the text block, or change the alignment and even change the spacing between new lines. All of this designed to help you read easily.
Amazon Kindle (2022)
The basic Kindle delivers a lot of the Paperwhite features but in a cheaper, smaller and lighter package. It’s the easiest Kindle to recommend to most buyers.
What font styles are there on Kindle?
When you open up the font family you winder you’ll notice a relatively wide range of options to choose from, ranging from classic fonts through to modern stables and even a couple of new, unique fonts. Here are all the fonts you’ll find on your Amazon Kindle:
- Amazon Ember
- Baskerville
- Bookerly
- Caecilia
- Caecilia Condensed
- Helvetica
- OpenDyslexic
- Palatino
Which Kindle font is the best for reading?
What style you go for – of course – is down to your own personal preference. You might choose Bookerly or Baskerville to get that classic book print style, just because you like the way it looks. And if you don’t struggle to read at all, why not?
Some fonts, however, have been designed specifically to be easy to read and their modern shapes and styles also make them render more cleanly on the digital E Ink display of the Kindle.
Amazon Ember, for example, was designed and made specifically for easy reading on a Kindle. It’s a clean font with relatively narrow letters, but letters with predominantly uniform thickness and flat ends to each ‘stroke’. Helvetica is someone similar, but with bolder, thicker lines as standard. It’s easy to read too, and is a font that’s been used all over the place – on book covers, signage and giant billboards – purely because it was designed to be clean and easy to read. Futura is similar, but narrower and with sharp angles on letters like ‘A’, ‘V’, ‘M’ and ‘N’.
If you struggle to read or have dyslexia, you might want to consider the OpenDyslexic font. This font was designed specifically for dyslexic readers to make it easier to distinguish and process letters. Most feature narrow, thin lines at the top but thick lines at the bottom, and it’s a much rounder font, with no even or uniform lines anywhere
