How to read double-page spreads on a Kindle

A mangaka can spend days on a detailed double-page spread, and saves it for the big moments: the climax of a battle, a new setting, the emotional peak of an arc.

In a printed book, the spread is about 10 inches wide.

On a Kindle, it often arrives split: you tap and see the left half of a character's face, then tap again for the right half.

Or the converter squashed the spread onto a single portrait page, and you get a thin strip of artwork between wide black bars.

Here's how to read spreads at a size that works.

The Kindle's landscape setting

The simplest way to view a spread is the Kindle's built-in orientation setting.

When you hit a spread that has been squashed or rotated poorly:

1. Tap the top of the screen to bring up the menu.
2. Hit the Aa (Display Settings) icon.
3. Go to the Layout tab.
4. Under Orientation, select the Landscape icon.
5. Physically turn your Kindle sideways.

The catch: it takes 4 taps to switch, and 4 more to switch back to Portrait mode when the spread is over. If an action sequence has 5 spreads in a row, you spend more time in menus than reading.

How MangaSendr handles spreads: rotation

When MangaSendr builds an EPUB, it checks the shape of every page in the volume.

If a page is wider than it is tall (like a standard two-page spread), MangaSendr rotates it 90 degrees inside the file itself before it's sent to the device. It doesn't split the spread into two halves, and there's no setting for this, so every wide page in every volume is handled the same way.

How reading a rotated spread works

Instead of going through the Kindle's orientation menu, you just turn the device.

When you are reading comfortably in Portrait mode and you reach a spread:

1. The spread appears sideways, filling most of the screen from top to bottom.
2. You turn your Kindle sideways in your hands. There's no menu to open.
3. The spread now runs along the long edge of your screen, so it's shown much larger than a squashed portrait version.
4. When you tap to go to the next page, it's a regular portrait page again. Turn the Kindle upright in your hands and keep reading.

Turning the device takes a second, so the big moments keep their pacing.

There are two limits to know about. Because the rotation is automatic, any page that is wider than it is tall gets rotated, including the occasional wide title page. And if your file stores a spread as two separate half-page images, MangaSendr won't join them back together, so they show up as two normal pages.

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