Anybody here publish anything to Amazon/Kindle the past couple or three months? Is your Look Inside view fully justified, and if so, what did you do to make that happen? I'm making good progress on formatting my ebook, but just yesterday I came across the latest Kindle formatting rules. They said your file can be rejected if you submit it with the text "forced justified," because a lot of people like their ebooks ragged right, and it's all about the reader experience, etc., etc. Moreover, the latest Kindles allow users to change the justification and if your text is forced justified, you're depriving them of the use of that feature. There's a difference of opinion on the Web as to what "forced justification" means. But let's say it means the same as full justification, called out as text-align:justify; in the book's style sheet. That's what I have at this point. I think it looks better and cleaner, and now that Kindle has enabled decent hyphenation, I'm not seeing "rivers" in my text when I view it in Kindle Previewer. On the other hand, some people are passionately in favor of ragged right. Don't know why, it strikes me as ugly and hard to read. But those readers exist, and it's not an aesthetic hill I want to die (or lose sales) on. After all, I'm not responsible for what a reader chooses to do in private with my book (gawsh, that sounds dodgy!). I don't have to know about it, or look at it. But I do feel responsible for the Look Inside being something I can take pride in. I've been checking recent releases, put up after the new rule was in place, and they're fully justified. Now I'm wondering how they did it. If you went for full, how did you do it? I really want to know.
Not everybody's kindle displays the same. Different fonts, different font sizes, and other options affect what is seen. Different kindles may also work differently with different versions of the software. When you force it to look nice on your kindle with your choices it often screws up the display for others. Ragged right is the best solution to provide a nice display to all users even if you prefer justification.
You might want to try asking @Lew or his wife Karen @K McIntyre about this. I notice their Look Inside features both have justified margins, and both are self-pubbed.
When they do it they pick the font to display on screen so they can justify their web page text. How you get them to do it for you is something they would have to explain. I do not think you have to justify your text to get it to display that way on their web site look inside feature. Again you need to contact them as they do keep making changes.
I was thinking of that, but wondered if it made a difference since this "no forced justification" rule was issued since they published. At least, I believe so.
Karen is just getting ready to publish again, so she might know. They were here visiting me last month, and while they were here her cover design was being done. She might well be encountering the issue just now. Two heads are better than one.
@K McIntyre has published this year (February) Parham's Mill, and yes, right-justified is the publishing standard. I am not aware of any change by Kindle, but we may find out this week when we upload her right-justified Ruby. I also don't know what is meant by "forced right". I will advise if we have issues. Again, we use Word exclusively so the upload process is all but instantaneous. Word's justification uses, I think, spaces of variable size, so you don't wind up with huge gaps if you have a line with a lot of long words, unless they ridiculous. Look Inside just displays the inside of your book as you uploaded it. CreateSpace can ensure that your Look Inside for the paperback skips the copyright page, acknowledgment and table of contents to go straight to text, but I had to go through tech support to make that happen.
