The TeleRead Typography Watch goes on. The big news is that Amazon Fires at last can offer all-text bold—an essential already found in recent updates for Kindle hardware and iOS and Android apps.

Yes, the above screenshot is of the Ember Bold font in action on my 5th generation Fire 8 HD, and if your Fire lacks that update, I assume it will come in time. If you’re impatient, follow the appropriate link on the Amazon update page and download the upgrade yourself.

A hat tip to Michawl Dolbear for alerting me about bold. And thank you, Jeff Bezos, on behalf of the millions of people with contrast-sensitivity issues and other vision problems. Took years, and we still have bold for only one style, when we should be able to apply it to them all. But finally Amazon has made the big breakthough and acknowledged the basic need.

Do you think I’m picking only on Amazon? No, the TeleRead Typography Watch would now like to ask Apple why it is impossible to adjust the margin widths in iBooks on my iPad Pro. I wondered if I was missing something.  But apparently not. Frank Lowney, an Apple watcher and a long-time TeleRead commenter, says iBooks development may be on hold while Apple deals with evolving ebook standards resulting from the merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum and W3C. Still, I don’t see why adjustable line lengths would be such a hassle to add now.

How about people who actually prefer narrower lines? Different readers will be served in different ways by different mixes of line lengths and spacing, font styles, font sizes and so on, depending on the kinds and complexity of the books they’re reading. I wish that developers of ebook apps would recognize this and the need for other forms of customization. We don’t all wear the same eyeglasses, if we need them. Similarly, one-size-fits-all isn’t right for ebook hardware and apps. It’s no wonder that so many people hate ebooks. In part that’s because the inflexible vendors have just bought this on themselves. Power to the user, please. It’s just plain good business and commonsense. I especially hope that Library Simplified and its library partners will keep this in mind.

On the positive, in regard to Apple, I’m really enjoying the mix of the Night Shift feature, auto brightness and the ambient-light-driven color correction on my iPad Pro. The mix seems to contribute to both my comfort and ease of reading. Let’s hope that color correction makes it to the less expensive iPads.

Now—as long as we’re talking wishlists, just what typographical features now AWOL would you like to show up in your favorite hardware or software? If you want to know all the possibilities, or at least almost all, I’d suggest you try out Moon+ Reader Pro if you own an Android device. In the iOS world, the KyReader and Marvin apps are among the more flexible apps, especially since, like Moon, they both let you install your own fonts.