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Using embedded fonts in ePUBs for free: DIY Publishing wins!

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I just tried something and was surprised by the result. After learning this morning that I don’t actually buy books from Kindle, but lease them, I wanted to see what my options are if I actually buy an ePUB. More than that, as a font designer, I wanted to try an ePUB with embedded fonts. So, I simply exported an ePUB with embedded font from my KF8 version of the book and emailed it to myself. Then I went to my iPad and looked to see what I got.

BlueFire & Nook worked with embedded fonts!

BlueFire was by far the best experience.  iBooks stripped the fonts, but other than that it looked very good. Nook read the fonts, but chewed up the formatting pretty bad. Kobo would not open it. Kindle will not read the fonts in my KF8 files even though they are supposed to read fine on the Fire.

Why is this important?

I’m going to start selling packages of my books, with ePUB, PDF, and KF8 versions, all for the normal price of my ebooks.

That way, anyone who wants a copy will own it and can open it in the ereader of their choice. I can sell it as an email attachable package which can be opened on any iPad in the ereader of your choice except for Kobo.

The DIY Publisher strikes again!

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Comments

Using embedded fonts in ePUBs for free: DIY Publishing wins! — 6 Comments

  1. Kindle Fire usually works okay for embedded fonts (both OpenType and TrueType), but the CSS has to be pretty clean. We’ve only ever gotten TrueType fonts to embed correctly on the Kindle Touch though. What fonts are you trying to embed and can you share the CSS? I’m sort of curious. Thanks, David.

  2. Hi Paul,

    I’m just using the Kindle KF8 Export Plug-in for InDesign CS6. The one time I looked, a long time ago, very quickly, it just looked like an @fontface rule. Somehow they do something to make the font a little less easy to steal, but I do no know what that is. I’m not a coder.

    The fonts are ones I design in FontLab and sell through MyFonts. Some are OpenType, some are some special TT fonts I made with 256 characters just for the ePUBs.

    I just emailed you a copy of the ePUB to the info[at]bbebooksthailand address on your site

  3. David,

    I checked out the CSS and it should be alright. The Bergsland Pro looks like this in your style sheet:

    @font-face {
    font-family:”Bergsland Pro”;
    font-style:italic;
    font-weight:normal;
    src : url(“../font/BergslandPro-Italic.otf”);
    }

    It should be okay for EPUB. For the KF8, the @font-face rule need to be inside the Amazon KF8 query, like this:

    @media amzn-kf8{

    /*== @font-face rules can go below here, but above the closing brace ==*/

    }

    I’m not sure how the InDesign CS6 export to KF8 works, but it’s hopefully doing it like that.

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