I’m reading a book on Kindle (read.amazon.com/[book path]) but the pages are displayed full length on my screen (Chromebook laptop/Chrome browser; using Firefox didn’t help), which makes the font hard to read. I’m looking for a way to zoom on the page.
The usual options like Ctrl+ and using the Kindle enlarge text icon “Aa” don’t work (with Ctrl+ the page immediately snaps back to the default display). I’m guessing this is due to the file format used by this particular book and some others I have. Other books I have are fine.
Using the Chrome Magnifier isn’t a good choice and affects all my tabs.
Amazon customer service, after Crtl+ and the “Aa” option, suggested changing my laptop Display setting, which I don’t want to do to read a Kindle book except if I can do it in that tab only.
Is there a Chrome extension that allows me to zoom/magnify/enlarge text I can use that someone could recommend?
As mentioned, I have several books where this is an issue but Googling mostly returned Ctrl+ zooming and the “Aa” options (and using “zoom” as a search term gets you lots of results about the video conferencing app). It seems like Amazon would have a better solution for this.
I don’t quite understand your question here. Is it the font size that you’re trying to change (which is what the Aa text sizes do), or something about the layout of paragraphs & pages?
Can you give an example of how you would like the text to be presented, if you could have it your way? i.e., what does “full length” mean, and what would you like it to be, instead?
Or if it’s easier, maybe just link to the actual Kindle book in question?
Is it maybe a book that was scanned as a PDF (so it doesn’t have reflowable text like a native ebook does)?
If so, if you can’t get it to look the way you want to in the web reader, you can download the Kindle book as a file, crack its DRM protection, and then use special software to either extract the original PDF or reflow it into something better (like HTML or plaintext): https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/
The view is similar to what you would see if you printed out a book page in landscape orientation. The book page text is centered with lots of whitespace on the sides.
Zooming in to read maybe half a page at a time would work, then I could page or scroll down.
It’s still not really clear to me from your description (it could be one of several things, like maybe the book was formatted by the publisher that way, or was uploaded from a shitty PDF, or maybe it’s your particular reflow settings). Could you possibly link to the book in question, or at least provide a screenshot?
Kindle eBooks are not one single format, but a container that supports many different formats internally (PDF, epub, html, etc.), each of which has different implications on the text size and formatting options you have access to. I can’t tell from your description which it is.
There are various workarounds depending on what it actually is, but they are only applicable to some formats and not others. Without being able to see the issue in question, it’s hard to say what you can do about it.
I’m pretty sure it’s the Kindle file format. Basically, between my Browser bar at the top of my laptop screen and the Chromebook taskbar at the bottom, it looks like a white sheet of paper in landscape orientation and the book page is centered but is maybe 25% as wide as the whole “sheet”. I took a screenshot but I’m not sure how to post it. It looks fine in the preview but I get the can’t embed files warning when trying to post.
It would be nice to zoom into the text so it’s maybe twice the width or larger on my screen.
If that doesn’t work, unfortunately, that particular books looks like a uploaded PDF to me (you can tell by using the zoom slider in the text size options… if you zoom and the whole page gets larger/smaller rather than just the text, it’s an uploaded scan). So it won’t support normal text size and reflow options like a “real” eBook, sadly.
There isn’t just one “Kindle” format, unfortunately. See this page: What file formats are supported for eBook manuscripts? Those are all different formats books wrapped by the “Kindle” container format, but the source format is what actually determines what text reflow options you the reader can access. A Kindle file is kinda like a zip file that can hold other files, and in this case, it looks like it’s wrapping a PDF that can’t be easily reflowed.
Anyway, some workarounds:
If you have a Mac/iPad, open the cloud reader in Safari and use “Reader Mode”, which at least gets rid of the excess borders and ads so you can focus on the PDF pages. It ends up looking like this, which is at least a little better than the default reader.
You can try reading it in a desktop/tablet Kindle app, which is less wasteful of screen real estate than the cloud reader.
Worst case, you can download the Kindle file to your computer (via the app) and then use Calibre to convert it to a real PDF: Use Calibre to Remove DRM from Kindle Books and Convert to PDF . That way you can use whatever PDF reader you want with it.
It still won’t be as nice as a native ebook, but better than the Kindle experience… You can also experiment with using Calibre to convert it to HTML or ePub. Sometimes that works OK. Not always.
Email the author nicely and explain that you have trouble reading the book because of the Kindle formatting, and ask if she would be willing to send you the original PDF or another format for easier reading.
Generally speaking, this is a shortcut lazy publishers will often take (especially for textbooks) if they don’t want to publish a “real” Kindle format with good text layout and images. They just publish the PDF version on the Kindle store and you end up with all these hacks to try to get it to read like a regular webpage. It’s a pain
If you do a lot of long-form reading of this sort, it might be easier to just get a 13" tablet that can display a book like this one page at a time.
I tried Reader View but it displays the title page and the arrows don’t advance the page when clicked. I do have a tablet I use and it’s much better, but you’d think there would be something available from Kindle to address this.
I have the Kindle app and it’s better but I only have one-page or two-page display options under “Aa”. I can use the Chromebook Full Screen function key to expand the viewing area to make it a little larger.
Yeah, sorry, Amazon just doesn’t really care that much about you That’s why people made the whole Calibre system (which is free/open-source) to get around these stupid restrictions. Many people were frustrated by Kindle restrictions and created a whole app to get around them.
For what it’s worth, in college I often ran into the same issues and just used a tablet for cheaper ebooks, or bought used copies of the paper books and had them sent to 1dollarscan.com, which dices up the book and scans it into a PDF for you that you can more easily work with.
You can also check a site called “libgen” (google it, because it keeps changing URL) to find pirated ebooks that don’t have these restrictions. This particular title isn’t on there, unfortunately. (You should still buy a copy of the book to support the author, but downloading an un-DRMed version from a pirate site is often a lot easier than using Calibre yourself.)
