Better Looking Digital Pubs with Amazon KF8 Format

Pete Prestipino
by Pete Prestipino 21 Oct, 2011
Better Looking Digital Pubs with Amazon KF8 Format

The digital world of ebooks is about to get a lot more attractive. Amazon just announced that several new features, including HTML5 support, will be arriving in Kindle Format 8 (KF8) - the upcoming file format that will replace Mobi 7. Folks, gone are the days of the black and white ebook.

KF8, which will roll out to Amazon's latest generation e-readers and reading apps in the next few months, provides publishers the ability to develop digital publications that require rich formatting and design functionality. The file format will be an ideal fit for children's books, comics and graphic novels, cookbooks and even technical and engineering books.

The KF8 format adds around 150 new formatting capabilities including fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars, Scalable Vector Graphics (SCG) and much more. A list of the most important enhancements in KF8 can be found here.

Amazon's Kindle Publisher Tools (including KindleGen 2 and Kindle previewer 2) do not currently support KF8, but Amazon expects availability soon. Amazon noted that all currently supported content will continue to work - e.g. .mobi files. Information on how to update existing titles to take advantage of KF8 capabilities will be available in the upcoming update of the Kindle Publishing Guidelines.

Pete Prestipino
Pete Prestipino
Digital marketing executive with proven experience in all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), performance-based advertising, consumer-generated/social media, email marketing, lead generation, Web design, usability, and analytics. - 20-year Internet marketing veteran, currently serving as the Digital Marketing Campaign Manager at Antenna Group (formerly Chicago Digital). - Former Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine, and a regular speaker on Web technology digital marketing strategy - Author of several books on digital marketing Including Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success; Affiliate 360: The Fundamentals of Performance Marketing; Domains 360: The Fundamentals of Buying & Selling Domain Names, and SEO 360: The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.