On an Amazon product page, a little way below the price, some Kindle books carry a line that reads Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled. Others carry Not Enabled. There is no box in KDP to tick for it. Amazon decides, after you upload, and does not say why.
It is worth understanding, because it is the difference between a Kindle book that looks typeset and one that is merely displayed.
What it actually does
Enhanced Typesetting is Amazon's newer layout engine for reflowable books. When a book is enabled, the reader's device renders it with a set of features the older engine does not have. Amazon's own list:
- Hyphenation and word spacing. Justified text is set with proper hyphenation, so the gaps between words stay even instead of opening into rivers of white space. This is the one readers notice, even if they cannot name it.
- Kerning and ligatures. Letter pairs are spaced the way a printed book spaces them.
- Drop caps that adapt their height to the screen and font size instead of colliding with the second line.
- Ragged-right as an option. The reader can choose left-aligned text rather than full justification.
- Font-size layout improvement. At large type sizes and short lines, the engine adjusts the layout so the page does not fall apart.
- Dynamic colour contrast, so text colours adapt to the reader's theme and stay legible.
- High-definition image support, with zoom, pinch and pan.
- Enhanced table formatting, with pan and zoom for tables too wide for the screen.
- Progressive download. The book opens before it has finished downloading.
- MathML, for mathematical notation.
- Page Flip. The navigation that lets a reader skim ahead or back through the pages and return to where they were. Amazon labels this separately on the product page — Page Flip: Enabled — but it arrives with Enhanced Typesetting.
None of this changes your file. It changes how Kindle draws your file. A book without it still reads; it just reads like a web page from 2012.
Who is eligible
Amazon's rule is one sentence: Enhanced Typesetting is applied only to reflowable Kindle books, uploaded as EPUB, DOC, DOCX or HTML.
That excludes two kinds of book outright:
- Fixed-layout books — picture books, comics, some cookbooks — where every page is a fixed picture. There is nothing to reflow, so there is nothing for the engine to typeset. Reflowable or fixed layout covers which your book should be.
- PDF uploads. KDP accepts a PDF for an ebook, reluctantly, and a PDF is not reflowable.
It also depends on the language. Amazon lists the supported ones — more than forty, including English, the major European languages, Japanese, Chinese and several Indic scripts — and a book in a language outside that list will not be enabled regardless of how clean the file is.
If your book is a novel, a memoir or a business book in English, uploaded as an EPUB or a Word file, you are eligible. The question is then whether the file itself gets through.
How to check before you publish
Open the file in Kindle Previewer, Amazon's free desktop app (what it is and what else it checks). If the book supports Enhanced Typesetting, an Enhanced Typesetting label appears in the navigation pane, and Book Information under the View menu reports it as Supported. If the label is not there, the file as it stands will not be enabled, and you can fix it before anyone sees it.
This is the useful check, because it runs on the file you made, before upload. Do it every time you re-export.
How to check after you publish
Look at the product detail page. Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled and Page Flip: Enabled appear in the product details when Amazon has turned them on.
Amazon's wording is that it is "continuously working to make Enhanced Typesetting compatible with more titles" and will "automatically enable enhancements for your book when possible". It gives no timeline, and no reason when a book is not enabled. If Kindle Previewer showed the label and the product page does not yet, the honest answer is to wait and look again; if Previewer never showed it, the file is the problem.
What keeps a book from being enabled
Amazon does not publish a list of disqualifiers. What it publishes instead is a long page of the HTML tags and CSS properties Enhanced Typesetting supports, plus a list of common conversion errors. A file that stays inside the supported set is the file that gets enabled; a file that leans on things outside it is the file that does not.
From that page, the things most likely to bite a book made from a Word manuscript:
- Strikethrough (
text-decoration: line-through) is listed as not supported. Track-changes residue and "deleted" text left in a manuscript export as exactly this. - Images embedded as base64 data must be real image files instead. Some exporters inline images this way.
- SVG with namespace prefixes should have the prefixes removed.
- Floats inside tables are unsupported, and a table caption set to the bottom is moved to the top.
- Width or height set to
inheritshould be a pixel value instead. - Video cannot be embedded directly.
- Language mismatches — the language declared in the package metadata
disagreeing with the language declared in the content — appear on Amazon's
list of common conversion errors, along with zero-byte or corrupted font
files, images one pixel wide, and table-of-contents links that point at
elements hidden with
display: none.
Notice what is not on that list: fonts, sizes, indents, justification, headings, italics, scene breaks. The ordinary furniture of a novel is all supported. Books fail on the exotic things, and the exotic things almost always arrive uninvited — from a Word export, a template, or a converter that tried to be clever.
Making a file that gets enabled
The practical rule is keep the file plain. Every feature Enhanced Typesetting adds is something the engine does for you; every fixed decision you bake into the file is something it has to work around.
- Headings as headings. Chapter titles styled as Heading 1 in Word, not made big and bold by hand. This is what becomes the navigation, too — Kindle: EPUB or Word? has the detail.
- Sizes in relative units. Ems and percentages, not points. The reader chooses the type size; a fixed size fights them and the engine.
- No embedded fonts unless you need them. A reflowable novel does not. The reader picks the typeface, and Amazon's own fonts are what the kerning and ligature tables are built for. A corrupt or empty font file is on Amazon's error list.
- No absolute positioning, no columns, no floats doing layout work. These are page-design tools, and there is no page.
- Leave justification alone. Forcing full justification in your CSS gains nothing once the engine is hyphenating properly, and produces rivers on devices where it is not.
- Clean the manuscript before export. Strikethrough, comments, tracked changes, and text coloured white to "hide" it all survive into the file.
- Run it through Kindle Previewer and look for the label.
Our Kindle formatter builds its EPUB on exactly this discipline: no font-family declared, every size relative, headings as real headings, text left-aligned so the reader's choice wins, and standard tags throughout. It is the stylesheet of a book that has nothing for the engine to object to.
Can you turn it off?
Some authors want to — usually because Enhanced Typesetting rendered a drop cap or a table differently from the way it looked in their preview. Amazon's help does not describe a switch for reflowable books. The practical route is the same as above, in reverse: fix the element the engine is rendering badly, rather than trying to opt out of the engine.
The short version
- Enhanced Typesetting is Amazon's better layout engine: real hyphenation, kerning, drop caps, Page Flip.
- Only reflowable books uploaded as EPUB, DOC, DOCX or HTML are eligible. Fixed-layout and PDF are not.
- Check the file in Kindle Previewer before you upload. Check the product page after.
- Amazon does not publish why a book is refused. It publishes what it supports; stay inside that.
- A plain file — headings, paragraphs, relative sizes, no embedded fonts, no layout tricks — is the file that gets enabled.