Editing the Bookerly font to work on Kobos (so it doesn't bold italicised words)

[Inquisitive_Ram]

Hi there

I recently got a Kobo Clara BW (which I am absolutely delighted with)

I wanted to put the bookerly font on it.

I downloaded the font from the official amazon website here: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/a...y?tag=mr060-20

And then created a new folder called 'Fonts' in the root directory of the Kobo and copied them across

But it had the common error that italicised words showed in bold. So I edited the fonts using the very helpful guidance here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...play_Correctly

This now means that the fonts work perfectly. I didn't 'patch' the Kobo as some have recommended to play around with the 'weights' as I personally found the defaults to be absolutely perfect

I did think it could be helpful for others to simply share the 'edited' font via a link on this website to save them having to go through the above procedure. While the procedure isn't complex it does require you to download software, and play around for a few mins etc and not everyone is comfortable with doing all that

I wondered if this may be possible? Given the fonts are taken from an official Amazon published source, I assume there is no licensing issue?

[Guego]

You can download a fixed version of Bookerly here : https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=4221036
Just put the 4 Bookerly files in your font folder.

[DNSB]

One advantage to using the later Bookerly versions is that version 1.010 from the original post has 1866 glyphs while version 1.201 in the later releases has 2316 glyphs which helps prevent seeing an unknown charcter glyph while reading.

The replacement character glyph in Bookerly is the standard black diamond with a white question mark (�). Some renderers will use alternate glyphs such as the narrow rectangle, narrow rectangle with a ?, character value in hex in a box, etc. even if the font includes the replacement character glyph.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One advantage to using the later Bookerly versions is that version 1.010 from the original post has 1866 glyphs while version 1.201 in the later releases has 2316 glyphs which helps prevent seeing an unknown charcter glyph while reading.

The replacement character glyph in Bookerly is the standard black diamond with a white question mark (�). Some renderers will use alternate glyphs such as the narrow rectangle, narrow rectangle with a ?, character value in hex in a box, etc. even if the font includes the replacement character glyph.

The link in the post above yours links to a thread with links to Google Drive that has Bookerly illegally available. The links need to be deleted so MR does not possibly get in trouble.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The link in the post above yours links to a thread with links to Google Drive that has Bookerly illegally available. The links need to be deleted so MR does not possibly get in trouble.

Looking at the Amazon Type Library Usage Guidelines, the following is stated:

Overview
Here is a list of the designs fully owned by Amazon and their intended usage:
Bookerly (eInk, LDC,3 weights and italic) Reading and Display
Bookerly Display (2 weights and italic) UX and Display
Amazon Ember (7 weights and italic) UX and reading
Amazon Ember Condensed (6 weights and italics) - UX
Amazon Ember Display (6 weights and italic) - Display and Branding

All of these fonts were developed under contract for Amazon - as a result Amazon owns them
fully outright. To include these designs in your work there are no licenses payments, no
royalties, no copyright or attribution notices required. The font itself carries the proper
ownership and copyright information in the header metadata of the font and Amazon does not
require any additional attribution or protections when using the font.

Special Cases
Always reflect proper names of the fonts, (ie, Brookerly and Amazon Ember), do not abbreviate or shorten. The company name of Amazon must always precened it if it is displayed in a menu or text option dialog box.

So it would appear that as long as the embedded ownership and copyright notices are not removed and the filenames are not changed, there is no issue with distributing these fonts.

[JWez]

After reading these posts I tried the Bookerly font. It's nice but to my eyes it doesn't look as good as GNU's FreeFonts, in particular FreeSerif. FreeSerif is big (over 10,000 glyphs) and causes hesitation when adjusting font size and weight, but page turn time is acceptable. The number of glyphs could be reduced with FontForge to delete unwanted languages but I never bothered. http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Looking at the Amazon Type Library Usage Guidelines, the following is stated:

So it would appear that as long as the embedded ownership and copyright notices are not removed and the filenames are not changed, there is no issue with distributing these fonts.

I wouldn't assume there are no issues. I'm not sure if including a copy of the fonts on a shared cloud drive counts as "include these designs in your work".

IMO, IANAL.

[JSWolf]

I think it would be better to be safe then sorry and remove the links Google Drive containing Bookerly.