Kindle e-readers come in many sizes and shapes nowadays. The two most popular are the standard Kindle e-ink device and the Kindle Fire Tablet. The Kindle e-ink device only displays black and white. A Kindle e-ink screen is precisely 3½x4¾" in size, with a ¼" margin all-round. You will want to remember this when you format your book, if you have any images, or charts and tables. When you think about using a chart inside your book, shrink it down to 3” wide, and see if you can read it. If you can, then it’s safe to use in a Kindle book. Below, you'll see an image of an e-ink Kindle, followed by an image of a Public Domain book, "The Prince and The Pauper," by Mark Twain, as it would appear on a Kindle e-ink device.
A basic Kindle Fire Tablet is 7” long, with a reading area of 3½” x 5”. It displays in vivid color. It also has advanced formatting features that the e-ink devices do not have, like drop caps, as just one example. Below, you'll see an image of the 7" Kindle Fire tablet, followed by an image of a book, "Madman Dreams," by Keith Ferstl, as it appears on the Kindle Fire tablet (note the Drop Caps and the red line highlighting the Chapter title.)
With very few exceptions, books have to work both on the regular Kindle device and the Fire Tablet. Children's books can be formatted strictly for the Fire, “forcing" the reader to view the content in landscape mode. Some other types of books, like cookbooks, can be formatted this way. Authors who want to format their books for the “Fire only" should remember that many, literally millions of, Kindle owners have the e-ink devices. You can see an example of a children's fixed-format book, below, from "The Fox and The Fawn," by Daniel Derasaugh, displaying the Region Magnification (pop-up text) capability, which is very useful for reading on the smaller devices, like Android smartphones with Kindle for Droid reading apps.
Unlike the iPad and the Nook Color, as of this writing, the Kindle Fire cannot support embedded, recorded files as “read-along” for children's books for self-publishers. Unlike the iPad, the Fire cannot support embedded video inside of eBooks at this time. (June 7, 2012, updated 5-31-2015)
The standard formatting for a Kindle novel is paragraphs with first line indent, and no blank lines between the paragraphs. If your book has block paragraphs with no indent, we will have to add the indents. If you have extra lines between paragraphs, we will have to delete the extra lines. The first paragraph of a chapter may usually be flush-left (no indent) and the first paragraph after a scene-break.
Remember that on the Kindle devices, readers can change the font size (all devices) and sometimes even the font (the Fire Tablet). This will cause your book text to reflow. If this concept is unfamiliar to you, you may wish to read our FAQ article on the topic, Text reflows--or wraps.
