Kindle Store bad formatting - ciromattia/kcc GitHub Wiki
Kindle Store Bad Formatting Examples
by: Alex Xu
Here are some formatting issues I've observed in some Kindle Store manga. Photos are of an eink Kindle, but similar issues exist on the Kindle apps for desktop and mobile.
(Files generated with Kindle Comic Converter do not have these issues.)
If you want to leave a comment: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc/discussions/1033
Faded Black Levels
This causes unneccessarily low contrast, which is hard to see and can cause eyestrain.
This is comparing the Kindle Store version of Fire Force Vol. 1 on a Kindle Scribe against the Humble Bundle version on a Hisense A9. Both devices are using Eink Carta 1200 panels.
The Kindle Scribe is completely capable of showing correct black levels, demonstrated here with the Humble Bundle version:
Incorrect black levels causes manga to look faded and washed out, and is a lot harder to see and can cause eyestrain. E-ink is already lower contrast than LCD, there's no need to make the contrast even lower with non-black images in manga.
One more comparison (the Kindle store is clearly faded with added margins):
Unneccesary margins
Several manga like Blue Lock have margins added at the bottom.
Manga should be fullscreen, since most Kindles are much smaller than physical paper volumes. I've even seen cases where margins are added on all 4 sides, not just the bottom:
And yes, the margins are visible on Kindle for PC too (just at the bottom):
(at the bottom and top:)
Inferior image quality
Here are some comparisons between manga that
- is not rendered at my Kindle’s native resolution and
- is rendered at the native resolution of my Kindle.
(Any blur you see is just how the image looks, images are in focus.)
The manga that was rendered at my Kindle's native resolution from Kindle Comic Converter is strikingly clear. By comparison, the other looks out of focus and blurry.
The main issue is that most manga on the Kindle Store is created with either KindleGen or Kindle Create with default settings. In practice, this usually means a fixed resolution of x1920 or x2250 pixels in height.
KCC instead resizes directly to a kindle’s specific screen resolution, skipping that intermediate x1920 or x2250 step. This gives far better results with far fewer resizing artifacts and moire. Moire can be a big problem due to the screen tones all manga use.
It is also the only way to utilize the full x2480 resolution of the Kindle Scribe.
Moreover, the downscaler on Kindle is very blurry, KCC uses a much sharper LANCOZ downscaler.
KCC also uses technologies like MozJpeg to offer very efficient compression with minimal artifacting around the text, which can be very noticeable around page refreshes. I've noticed Kindle Store manga having very heavy jpg compression artifacts, especially around text.
PNG and GIF can offer much better compression for monochrome manga images than JPG, but the PNG/GIF renderer on Kindle is rather buggy:
gaps between spreads
Incorrect page turn direction for right to left manga.
Screentones don't pop
The screen tones look very faded on the Kindle Store compared to KCC:
Here's what the print edition looks like:
2 page spread alignment off by 1
Sometimes there's a single page misaligned in landscape:
which throws off the alignment off all further pages. The spine should have whitespace in the center, not on the edge.:
Conclusion
Kindle Store manga can have very bad formatting that can be fixed with Kindle Comic Converter
If you want to leave a comment: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc/discussions/1033
Source
https://youtu.be/ueDjSp64MrQ?si=7rH4IO7MsiFlpE55
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MdzT-BNGQnecoVC6rKZUXs5ycHvaNX5R?usp=share_link