How to fix huge white margins on Kindle manga

On a 7-inch Kindle Paperwhite or an 8-inch Kobo Sage, a manga page often takes up only about 60% of the screen, in the center, with a wide white border on all four sides.

Pinch to zoom and the screen flashes black and white, and you lose your place.

Here's where those margins come from, and how to remove most of them without fiddling with settings.

The aspect ratio problem ("letterboxing")

Those white borders aren’t a bug in your Kindle. They come from a mismatch in aspect ratios.

Manga pages are physically printed and scanned at a roughly 2:3 ratio (taller than they are wide).

E-reader screens are a little wider than that:

• Kindle Paperwhite (2024 or newer, 7-inch) and Colorsoft: MangaSendr renders 1272 x 1696 pages for them, a 3:4 ratio.
• Kindle Paperwhite (11th Gen, 2021): 1236 x 1648 pixels, also 3:4.
• Kindle Oasis: 1264 x 1680 pixels, also close to 3:4.
• Kobo Libra: A similar 3:4 shape.

When you send a 2:3 image to a 3:4 screen, the e-reader cannot stretch the image to fill the screen (that would distort the artwork, making characters look fat). To preserve the original artwork, the Kindle shrinks the image until the longest side fits, and then pads the empty space with white pixels. This is called Letterboxing.

Scans add their own margin

The raw scan of a manga page often already includes the white margin of the paper page.

So you get the paper margin from the scan plus the Kindle's letterbox. The result is a postcard-sized drawing on a large screen.

Cropping with KCC

KCC (Kindle Comic Converter) can crop the images during conversion. Set the crop too strong, though, and it can cut off part of a speech bubble or the edge of a drawing, so it takes some trial and error.

How MangaSendr trims margins

MangaSendr trims plain white borders automatically on every page it converts:

1. Content Detection: It finds the "bounding box" of everything on the page that isn't plain white, which ignores the empty paper around the edges.
2. Cropping: It cuts the page down to that box, so the scan's paper margin is gone. Because it only removes plain white, it won't cut into a speech bubble or the edge of a drawing.
3. Hardware Resizing: Next, it resizes the clean image to fit your Kindle model's screen.
4. Centering: If the trimmed page still doesn't match the screen's shape, the leftover space is filled with white and the page sits in the middle. With the paper margin already gone, that leftover strip is much thinner than before.

Wide double-page spreads are handled too. Instead of shrinking a spread to fit a portrait screen, MangaSendr rotates it 90 degrees so it fills the screen when you turn the Kindle sideways.

Small text gets easier to read because the art is physically larger on the display.

Where it falls short

The trimming only removes borders that are plain white. If a scan has grey or yellowed paper, a scanner shadow, or specks along the edge, some of that margin may stay. For those files, a manual crop in KCC or an image editor still does a better job.

Your first delivery is free. Pricing covers what's included after that.

Related guides

• How to fix washed-out manga on Kindle: boost contrast on e-ink displays.
• How to read double-page spreads on Kindle: handle landscape art on small screens.
• How to send CBZ manga to Kindle: the full CBZ conversion and delivery guide.