Amazon KF8 Format Replaces .Mobi & Adds HTML5 Support to Kindle Fire eBooks

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Amazon is heavily banking on the predicted popularity of its upcoming Kindle Fire tablet. As such, the retail giant has also updated its e-book format with future-proofing, particularly with support or HTML5 and CSS.

Amazon is releasing its Kindle Fire by mid-November, and the company is already working on tweaking its vast collection of eBooks for maximum compatibility with the Kindle Fire. Amazon is actually retiring its. MOBI format in favor of the new .KF8 format (or Kindle Format 8), which will include support for 150 new formatting tags, which include HTML5 and CSS support.

These include tags for embedded fonts, drop caps, CSS selectors for line spacing, alignment, color, justification, margin, border and style. In effect, new Kindle Format e-books will mean that ebooks are now very long websites that have been designed to act like books read on an electronic reader like the Kindle Fire.

Amazon says the company will be converting all existing content into the .KF8 format, and users also have the option of updating existing titles they have on their Kindle ebook readers and Kindle readers on other mobile platforms. For this purpose, Amazon is also releasing a new set of Kindle Publishing Guidelines, which ebook authors and publishers should take into consideration when building their content for distribution via Amazon.

Being HTML5-powered content, this means that The new Amazon Kindle format will ideally support a wider array of devices, and not just Amazon’s proprietary Kindle ebook reader. The new format also allows for more versatile formatting, as well as a more portable format. The company is said to be looking for a replacement for its .MOBI format, and this seems to be it.

Amazon will initially implement the new technology on the Kindle Fire, and on other current Kindle tablets. Support for e-ink Kindle readers will likewise be coming soon.