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Amazon's Thin Helvetica Syndrome: Font Anorexia vs. Kindle Readability (teleread.com)
David Rothman writes: The Thin Helvetica Syndrome arises from the latest Kindle upgrade and has made e-books less readable for some. In the past, e-book-lovers who needed more perceived-contrast between text and background could find at least partial relief in Helvetica because the font was heavy by Kindle standards. But now some users complain that the 5.7.2 upgrade actually made Helvetica thinner. Of course, the real cure would be an all-text bold option for people who need it, or even a way to adjust font weight, a feature of Kobo devices. But Amazon stubbornly keeps ignoring user pleas even though the cost of adding either feature would be minimal. Isn't this supposed to be a customer-centric company?
My wife got a Kindle a few years ago and liked it but still found it hard to read.
At one point I saw her reading something in Comic Sans and I thought it was odd and unrelated.
Somewhat later she found about about dyslexie font and OpenDyslexic font and started using them on various devices.
I found out you could manually import fonts onto the kindle paperwhite so we ordered one.
Amazon patched all the Kindles to block importing fonts and limit you to the preloaded fonts.
There is a workaround involving downloading free ebooks and converting them in such a way that you embed the font but it isn't an option for the vast majority of what she would like to read on the Kindle.
We then sold our Kindles and she just reads on a laptop instead.
To add to the fun it isn't just Amazon, I haven't found a way to add the dyslexie/opendislexic font to a non rooted android phone. How hard would it be for device manufacturers to just add a simple font import or heaven forbid actually include more fonts in the base configuration?
As is phones/phablets/tablets are more common than Kindles and now big enough/cheap enough to make the Kindle less important but it's just moved my concern about this issue from Amazon to Android.