Amazon has updated the Kindle Paperwhite with the highest resolution Paperwhite display, the exclusive Kindle font Bookerly, and a new typesetting engine. The new Kindle Paperwhite has a new display delivering the same 300 pixels per inch that is also offered by the top-of-the-line Kindle Voyage. Even with the new higher resolution display, Amazon says that the new Kindle Paperwhite delivers battery life that is measured in weeks rather than hours.

Kindle Paperwhite now offers Bookerly, an exclusive font designed from the ground up for reading on digital screens. Bookerly is inspired by the artistry of the best fonts in modern print books, but is hand-crafted for readability at any size. It introduces a lighter look.

The new Kindle Paperwhite also offers an all-new typesetting engine:

• It adds hyphenation to break words at the right place, creates paragraphs with consistent lines, and adjusts the space between words.
• New kerning and ligatures automatically adjust character spacing to make it easier and faster to recognize words at any font size. Similar to a typesetter formatting a print book, Kindle Paperwhite will look at neighboring pairs of letters in context and adjust the character spacing to suit the word, removing distracting whitespace between letters and making the shape of the word more beautiful to help with word recognition speed.
• Print books often use drop caps to add emphasis to the first page of a chapter. In eBooks, this is challenging to replicate given the ability to adjust font size and line spacing. The new typesetting engine presents drop caps, text, and images on Kindle just as the author intended, and dynamically adjusts the layout as the reader changes the text size.
• One of the benefits of reading on Kindle is that you can customize the font size based on personal preference. As you increase the size of a font, fewer words appear on each page, often creating distractions like large white space or broken sentences. Now, Kindle Paperwhite automatically adapts when a reader chooses the largest font sizes, customizing the margins, columns, indents, nested lists, borders, and drop caps to keep the page easy to read.

The new typography and layout improvements will be delivered as part of a free, over-the-air software update in the coming weeks.

The new Kindle Paperwhite is $119. It is available for pre-order and will start shipping June 30.